Unspoken Sermons - Obedience

To put off obeying Him till we find a credible theory concerning Him, is to set aside the potion we know it our duty to drink, for the study of the various schools of therapy. You know what Christ requires of you is right --- much of it as least you believe to be right, and your duty to do, whether He said it or not: do it. If you do not do what you know of the truth, I do not wonder that you seek intellectually, for that kind of search may well be, as Milton represents it, a solace even to the fallen angels. But do not call anything that may be so gained, The Truth. How can you, not caring to be true, judge concerning him whose life was to do for very love the things you confess your duty, yet do them not? Obey the truth, I say, and let theory wait. Theory may spring from life, but never life from theory.

Unspoken Sermons

If there be a God, and I am his creature, there may be, there should be, there must be some open communication between He and I. If anyone allow a God, but one scarce good enough to care about his creatures, I will yield him that it were foolish to pray to such a God; but the notion that, with all the good impulses in us, we are the offspring of a cold-hearted devil, is so horrible in its inconsistency, that I would ask that man what hideous and cold-hearted disrregard to the truth makes him capable of the supposition! To such a one God's terrors, or, if not His terrors, then God's sorrows yet will speak; the divine something in him will love, and the love be left moaning.
If i find my position, my consciousness, that of one from home nay, that of one from some sort of prison; if I find that I can neither rule the world in which I live nor my own thoughts or desires; that I cannot quiet my own passions, order my likings, determine my ends, will my growth, forget when I would, or recall what I forget; that I cannot love where I would, or hate where I would; that I am no king over myself; that I cannot supply my own needs, do not even always know which of my seeming needs are to be supplied, and which treated as impostersl if, in a word, my own being is everyway too much for mel if I can neither understand it, be satisfied with it, nor better it --- may it not well give me a pause --- the pause that ends in prayer?
When my own scale seems too large for my management; when I reflect that I cannot account for my existence, have had no poorest hand in it, neither, should I like it, can do anything towards causing it to cease; when I think that I can do nothing to make up to those I love, any more than to those I hate, for evils I have done them and sorrows I have caused them; that in my worst moments I disbelieve in my best, in my best loathe my worst; that there is in me no wholeness, no unity; that life is not a good to me, for I scorn myself --- when I think all or any such things, can it be strange if I think also that surely there ought to be somewhere a being to account for me, one to account for himself, and make the round of my existence just; one whose very being accounts and is necessary to account for mine; whose presence in my being is imperative, not merely to supplement it, but to make myself my existence a good?

Unspoken

Love is one, and love is changeless.
For love loves unto purity. Love have ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected -- not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.