## New highlights added July 1, 2024 at 6:07 PM I did not for a moment imagine that to be saved from my sins meant to be saved from the punishment of them. That would have been no glad tidings to me. My sinfulness was ever before me, and often my sins too, and I loved them not, yet could not free myself of them. ([Location 213013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=213013)) My dear sir, no conviction can be got, or if it could be got, would be of any sufficing value, through that dealer in second-hand goods, the intellect. If by it we could prove there is a God, it would be of small avail indeed: we must see him and know him, to know that he was not a demon. But I know no other way of knowing that there is a God but that which reveals WHAT he is--the only idea that could be God--shows him in his own self-proving existence--and that way is Jesus Christ as he revealed himself on earth, and as he is revealed afresh to every heart that seeks to know the truth concerning him." ([Location 213027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=213027)) Polwarth neither sought the curate in the vestry, waited for him at the church-door, nor followed him to his lodging. He was not of those who compliment a man on his fine sermon. How grandly careless are some men of the risk of ruin their praises are to their friends! "Let God praise him!" said Polwarth; "I will only dare to love him." He would not toy with his friend's waking Psyche. ([Location 214028](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=214028)) There is a great difference between I WISH I WAS and I SHOULD LIKE TO BE--as much as between a grumble and a prayer. To be content is not to be satisfied. No one ought to be satisfied with the imperfect. It is God's will that we should bear, and contentedly--because in hope, looking for the redemption of the body. And we know he has a ready servant who will one day set us free." ([Location 214233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=214233)) but if your heart condemn you, what I have to say is, Call not yourselves Christians, but consider whether you ought not to become disciples indeed. ([Location 214433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=214433)) But then came the thought--"The fellow will say that, there being no sign of a God, the burden of proof lies with me." And therewith he saw how useless it would be to discuss the question with any one who, not seeing him, had no desire to see him. "No," he said, "my business is not to prove to any other man that there is a God, but to find him for myself. If I should find him, then will be time enough to think of showing him." ([Location 215047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=215047)) ## New highlights added April 6, 2025 at 11:58 AM It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about -- what to do next. ([Location 32065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=32065)) ## New highlights added April 6, 2025 at 12:58 PM Everything is possible; but without labour and failure nothing is achievable. ([Location 32185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=32185)) ## New highlights added April 7, 2025 at 4:58 PM Be sure that, come what may of the rest, let the flames of hell ebb or flow, that man is safe, for he is delivered already from the only devil that can make hell itself a torture, the devil of selfishness -- the only one that can possess a man and make himself his own living hell. He is out of all that region of things, and already dwelling in the secret place of the Almighty." ([Location 33448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=33448)) He will not have it that his Father in heaven is not perfect. He believes entirely that God loves, yea, is love; and, therefore, that hell itself must be subservient to that love, and but an embodiment of it; that the grand work of Justice is to make way for a Love which will give to every man that which is right and ten times more, even if it should be by means of awful suffering -- a suffering which the Love of the Father will not shun, either for himself or his children, but will eagerly meet for their sakes, that he may give them all that is in his heart." ([Location 33456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=33456)) There is no spiritual victory gained by a verbal conquest; or by any kind of torture, even should the rack employed be that of the purest logic. ([Location 33493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=33493)) Faith came of itself, and abode, and grew; for it needs but a vision of the Divine, and faith in God is straightway born in the soul that beholds it. ([Location 33901](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=33901)) "I have tried a little. I cannot say I have done my best. I have been so peevish and irritable." "You could not quite help that." "How kind you are to excuse me so! It makes me so much stronger to try again." "My father used to say that God was always finding every excuse for us that could be found; every true one, you know; not one false one." ([Location 33954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=33954)) I could trust God with what I could not speak to my father about. He is my father's father, you know; and so, more to him and me than we could be to each other. The more we love God, the more we love each other; for we find he makes the very love which sometimes we foolishly fear to do injustice to, by loving ([Location 34017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=34017)) Is not salvation the uniting of all our nature into one harmonious whole -- God first in us, ourselves last, and all in due order between? ([Location 34615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=34615)) It is not house, and fire, and plenty of servants, and all the things that money can procure, that make a home -- not father or mother or friends; but one heart which will not be weary of helping, will not be offended with the petulance of sickness, nor the ministrations needful to weakness: this "entire affection hating nicer hands" will make a home of a cave in a rock, or a gipsy's tent. ([Location 35139](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=35139)) Those who are in the habit of regarding the real and the ideal as essentially and therefore irreconcileably opposed, will remark that I cannot have drawn the representation of Falconer faithfully. Perhaps the difficulty they will experience in recognizing its truthfulness, may spring from the fact that they themselves are un-ideal enough to belong to the not small class of strong-minded friends whose chief care, in performing the part of the rock in the weary land, is -- not to shelter you imprudently. They are afraid of weakening your constitution by it, especially if it is not strong to begin with; so if they do just take off the edge of the tempest with the sharp corners of their sheltering rock for a moment, the next, they will thrust you out into the rain, to get hardy and self-denying, by being wet to the skin and well blown about. ([Location 35173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=35173)) ## New highlights added April 7, 2025 at 6:58 PM "I am not right at all to-day, Margaret. God can't love me, I am so hateful." "Don't measure God's mind by your own, Euphra. It would be a poor love that depended not on itself, but on the feelings of the person loved. A crying baby turns away from its mother's breast, but she does not put it away till it stops crying. She holds it closer. For my part, in the worst mood I am ever in, when I don't feel I love God at all, I just look up to his love. I say to him: 'Look at me. See what state I am in. Help me!" Ah! you would wonder how that makes peace. And the love comes of itself; sometimes so strong, it nearly breaks my heart." ([Location 35258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=35258)) Perhaps the greatest benefit that resulted to Hugh from being thus made a pilgrim and a stranger in the earth, was, that Nature herself saw him, and took him in, Hitherto, as I have already said, Hugh's acquaintance with Nature had been chiefly a second-hand one -- he knew friends of hers. Nature in poetry -- not in the form of Thomsonian or Cowperian descriptions, good as they are, but closely interwoven with and expository of human thought and feeling -- had long been dear to him. In this form he had believed that he knew her so well, as to be able to reproduce the lineaments of her beloved face. But now she herself appeared to him -- the grand, pure, tender mother, ancient in years, yet ever young; appeared to him, not in the mirror of a man's words, but bending over him from the fathomless bosom of the sky, from the outspread arms of the forest-trees, from the silent judgment of the everlasting hills. She spoke to him from the depths of air, from the winds that harp upon the boughs, and trumpet upon the great caverns, and from the streams that sing as they go to be lost in rest. She would have shone upon him out of the eyes of her infants, the flowers, but they had their faces turned to her breast now, hiding from the pale blue eyes and the freezing breath of old Winter, who was looking for them with his face bent close to their refuge. And he felt that she had a power to heal and to instruct; yea, that she was a power of life, and could speak to the heart and conscience mighty words about God and Truth and Love. ([Location 35323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=35323)) ## New highlights added May 2, 2026 at 1:03 AM Such a one will see the customs of his ancestors glorified in the mists of the past; what is noble in them will appeal to all that is best in his nature, spurring the most generous of his impulses, and stirring up the conscience that would be void of offence. When the operative force of such regards has been fostered by the teaching of a revered parent; when the influences he has left behind are nourished and tended, with thorough belief and devoted care, by her who shared his authority in life, and now bears alone the family sceptre, there can be no bound set to their possible potency in a mind of high spiritual order. ([Location 260659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=260659)) Call the thing enthusiasm or what you will, so you believe it there, and genuine. ([Location 260667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=260667)) But in the hands of a man whom, from the top of their wealth, they regarded as but a poor farmer, they forgot all about it--along with a few other more important and older-world matters; for where Mammon gets in his foot, he will soon be lord of the house, and turn not merely Rank, his rival demon, out of doors, but God himself. ([Location 260673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=260673)) Let the dreamer only do the truth of his dream, and one day he will realize all that was worth realizing in it--and a great deal more and better than it contained. ([Location 260679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=260679)) Alister had no far-reaching visions of anything to come out of his; he had, like the true man he was, only the desire to live up to his idea of what the people looked up to in him. ([Location 260680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=260680)) ## New highlights added May 2, 2026 at 9:03 PM To the wise his doubts would have been his best credentials; they were worth tenfold the faith of most. It was truth, and higher truth, he was always seeking. The sadness which coloured his deepest individuality, only one thing could ever remove--the conscious presence of the Eternal. This is true of all sadness, but Ian knew it. ([Location 261408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=261408)) ## New highlights added May 2, 2026 at 11:03 PM Millions of human beings but for suffering would never develop an atom of affection. The man who would spare DUE suffering is not wise. It is folly to conclude a thing ought not to be done because it hurts. There are powers to be born, creations to be perfected, sinners to be redeemed, through the ministry of pain, that could be born, perfected, redeemed, in no other way. ([Location 261622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=261622)) ## New highlights added May 3, 2026 at 6:42 PM The question, dim-lucent, showed her, if but in shadow, something of the truth concerning herself--not so that she could grasp it, for she saw it as in a glimmer, a fluctuating, vanishing flash--namely, that she cared more about salvation than about God--that, if she could but keep her boy out of hell, she would be content to live on without any nearer approach to him in whom she had her being! ([Location 262263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262263)) ## New highlights added May 3, 2026 at 9:09 PM She did not yet understand that salvation lies in being one with Christ, even as the branch is one with the vine;--that any salvation short of knowing God is no salvation at all. What moment a man feels that he belongs to God utterly, the atonement is there, the son of God is reaping his harvest. ([Location 262406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262406)) For the sake of what they count revealed, they refuse all further revelation, and what satisfies them is merest famine to the next generation of the children of the kingdom. Instead of God's truth they offer man's theory, and accuse of rebellion against God such as cannot live on the husks they call food. But ah, home-hungry soul! thy God is not the elder brother of the parable, but the father with the best robe and the ring--a God high above all thy longing, even as the heavens are high above the earth. ([Location 262412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262412)) ## New highlights added May 5, 2026 at 11:42 PM He looked on his calling as entirely enough to fill full the life that would fulfil the calling. ([Location 262722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262722)) As to the vulgar notion of a man's obligation to himself, he had learned to despise it. ([Location 262724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262724)) With joy he recognized the higher dignity of the shepherd of a few poor, lean, wool-torn human sheep, than of the man who stands for himself, however "spacious in the possession of dirt." ([Location 262735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262735)) If Alister Macruadh was not in the highest grade of Christianity, he was on his way thither, for he was doing the work that was given him to do, which is the first condition of all advancement. ([Location 262738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262738)) Not many of them, however, understood how much he believed that he had to give an account of his people. He was far from considering such responsibility the clergyman's only. Again and again had he expostulated with some, to save them from the slow gaping hell of drink, and in one case, he had reason to hope, with success. ([Location 262752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262752)) undeveloped natures in the presence of a force, revere it as POWER--understanding by POWER, not the strength to create, to harmonize, to redeem, to discover the true, to suffer with patience; but the faculty of having things one's own vulgar, self-adoring way. ([Location 262797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262797)) They long after a repose that is not mere cessation of labour: there is a positive, an active rest. ([Location 262805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262805)) Many who think themselves free have never yet even seen the shell that imprisons them--know nothing of the liberty wherewith the Lord of our life would set them free. ([Location 262812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=262812)) ## New highlights added May 9, 2026 at 7:09 AM It is not a good sign of any age that it should find it hard to believe in such simplicity and purity as that of these young men; it is perhaps even a worse sign of our own that we should find it difficult to believe in such love between men. ([Location 263501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=263501)) ## New highlights added May 10, 2026 at 11:09 PM A solitary instance of anything great is enough to prove it human, yea necessary to humanity. ([Location 263592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=263592)) I have wondered whether the man in whom such love is possible, may not spring of an altogether happy conjunction of male and female--a father and mother who not only loved each other, but were of the same mind in high things, of the same lofty aims in life, so that their progeny came of their true man-and-woman-hood. ([Location 263593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=263593)) ## New highlights added May 11, 2026 at 7:52 PM This, our own old land, I feel as if I loved in something the same way as I love my mother. Often in the hot summer-days, lying on my face in the grass, I have kissed the earth as if it were a live creature that could return my caresses! The long grass is a passion to me, and next to the grass I love the heather, not the growing corn. I am a fair farmer, I think, but I would rather see the land grow what it pleased, than pass into the hands of another. Place is to me sacred almost as body. ([Location 263726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=263726)) But we must be weaned, I say only weaned, from that kind of thing; we must not love the outside as if it were the inside! ([Location 263732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=263732)) Everything comes that' we may know the sender-of whom it is a symbol, that is, a far-off likeness of something in him; and to him it must lead us-the self-existent, true, original love, the making love. ([Location 263733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=263733)) ## New highlights added May 11, 2026 at 11:52 PM This, our own old land, I feel as if I loved in something the same way as I love my mother. Often in the hot summer-days, lying on my face in the grass, I have kissed the earth as if it were a live creature that could return my caresses! The long grass is a passion to me, and next to the grass I love the heather, not the growing corn. I am a fair farmer, I think, but I would rather see the land grow what it pleased, than pass into the hands of another. Place is to me sacred almost as body. There is at least something akin between the love we bear to the bodies of our friends, and that we bear to the place in which we were born and brought up." ([Location 263726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=263726)) When we are one with our life, so that no prayer can be denied, there will be no end to the lovely possibilities." ([Location 263776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=263776)) We must be constantly giving ourselves away, we must dwell in houses of infinite dependence, or sit alone in the waste of a godless universe." ([Location 263786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=263786)) ## New highlights added May 12, 2026 at 2:52 PM Even if I be in the right, I have a right to yield my right--and to HIM I will yield it. ([Location 264166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264166)) Thereupon rushed into his heart the joy of giving up, of deliverance from self; and pity, to leaven his contempt, awoke for Sercombe. No sooner had he yielded his pride, than he felt it possible to love the man--not for anything he was, but for what he might and must be. ([Location 264171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264171)) "God let the man kill the stag," he said; "I will let him have the head." ([Location 264174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264174)) If in doubt whether a man be a gentleman or not, hear him speak to a woman he regards as his inferior: his very tone will probably betray him. A true gentleman, that is a true man, will be the more carefully respectful. ([Location 264352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264352)) While one is yet only IN LOVE, the real person, the love-capable, lies covered with the rose-leaves of a thousand sleepy-eyed dreams, and through them come to the dreamer but the barest hints of the real person of whom is the dream. A thousand fancies fly out, approach, and cross, but never meet; the man and the woman are pleased, not with each other, but each with the fancied other. The merest common likings are taken for signs of a wonderful sympathy, of a radical unity--of essential capacity, therefore, of loving and being loved; at a hundred points their souls seem to touch, but their contacts are the merest brushings as of insect-antennae; the real man, the real woman, is all the time asleep under the rose-leaves. Happy is the rare fate of the true--to wake and come forth and meet in the majesty of the truth, in the image of God, in their very being, in the power of that love which alone is being. They love, not this and that about each other, but each the very other--a love as essential to reality, to truth, to religion, as the love of the very God. Where such love is, let the differences of taste, the unfitnesses of temperament be what they may, the two must by and by be thoroughly one. ([Location 264431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264431)) ## New highlights added May 12, 2026 at 7:52 PM They were indeed not yet true enough in themselves to suspect the presence of either a truth or a falsehood. ([Location 264607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264607)) ## New highlights added May 12, 2026 at 11:52 PM We mean the things themselves only for the sake of what they say to us. As our sense of smell brings us news of fields far off, so those fields, or even the smell only that comes from them, tell us of things, meanings, thoughts, intentions beyond them, and embodied in them." ([Location 264693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264693)) "Whatever influences us must be a person. But God is the only real person, being in himself, and without help from anybody; and so we talk even of the world which is but his living garment, as if that were a person; and we call it SHE as if it were a woman, because so many of God's loveliest influences come to us through her. ([Location 264697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264697)) Liberty is--God and the souls that love; these are the limitless room, the space, in which thoughts, the souls of things, have their being. ([Location 264736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264736)) "Some of Nature's lessons you must learn before you can understand them." ([Location 264801](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264801)) Keats's youthful delight in Nature was more intense even than Wordsworth's, ([Location 264815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264815)) People are always saying 'I think,' when they are not thinking at all, when they are at best only passing the thoughts of others whom they do not even know. ([Location 264910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0032UY4Q6&location=264910))