American clergyman (1814-1882)
There is an inherent and absolute authority in all truth, which makes it, in the end, unconquerable and victorious. The truth is mighty, and will prevail. What is founded on error, has rottenness for its corner-stone; and although it may temporarily be upheld by foreign aid, yet, deserted by its supporters, it always finally tumbles to the ground.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
God has no religion.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
Man is a spirit, and spiritual things are not foreign and strange to him, but he runs away from his own light, he darkens his own windows, he denies himself that he may deny God, he scoffs at what he really fears and knows to be sacred and true. He tries to believe in the world and its ways and to sell himself for its pottage.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
You cannot earn or merit Salvation by any obedience. It is not the reordering of your desolated nature, or making yourself a fit temple of God, that can save you; for at your best you remain a ruin.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
Faith is confidence in our moral instincts as the best evidence we have or can have of the Divine will and the Divine character.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
We are beginning to see that religion is not a spontaneous, self-protecting plant; that faith is not safely and wisely left to its own growth.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
The wisest man is the man who is most in sympathy with nature; who follows most closely in her footsteps; yields most readily to her intimations; catches quickest her whispers; sets up least his own will, or prejudices, or notions, against her instructions.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
All prayer is the exercise of a spiritual imagination which realizes the Divine Presence by faith. Our first-hand views of spiritual things are peeps through the rifts which our religious imaginations make in the clouds the senses raise twixt earth and heaven.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
Jesus was no school-man, was no ecclesiastic, was no heresiarch. He spoke the language and the truth and the religion of a simple, artless, deep-centered representative of universal humanity--true always, everywhere, and for all.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
People still talk of getting religion, as though it were a peculiar kind of coin, alone receivable at the heavenly toll-gate; of experiencing religion, as though it were experiencing an electric shock; of an interest in Christ, as a shareholder does of his stock in some prosperous venture.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
Man alone can grow God-wise. He is made a little lower than the angels only, and is over all other creatures as a king. It is not his exceptional beauty, or gifts, or culture, that give him this distinction. It is his nature; and that nature is priceless and glorious in every single specimen.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
The soul knows God. It is a hypocrite when it professes ignorance. It has wilfully left home and the father's house to eat with swine.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
Are we to believe that God peculiarly dwells in temples made with hands--he who is a spirit, and occupies all space; that he needs articulated prayers--he who knows our thoughts before they are framed with words; that sprinklings and washings, that bread and wine, that mediation of trained priests--in short, that religion as a ritual, something in itself and for itself, with its own times, seasons, customs, and feelings, is acceptable to him or necessary to us? Away with such husks of form, such superstitions of the world's childhood! Let religion henceforth be a life; and life a religion. Let the heart, the conscience, the intellect, worship God and serve man, and the bondage of rites and times and symbols and external sanctities wholly disappear.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
When we do not recognize God in our lives and fortunes, it is because we will not, not because we cannot. To doubt or deny his holy, solemn, and awful presence in life is to be wilfully blind.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
Why retreat from the world into a cell of prayer, or a cathedral of worship, to find God? Is he not as present in the din of the workshop as in the silence of the cloister; in the stirring crowd, as in the solitude of the mountain height?
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
God is not so busy that he overlooks you.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
When we understand the source of evils, and are alive to their existence, they are already half conquered.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
True science knows that man invents nothing, but merely finds out what God has invented.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
Truth is none the less true because it is undiscovered.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
Conscience is the tongue of Heaven.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York