[The Lord] had wanted to give the man something so much better than a pure skin, and had only roused in him an unseemly delight in his own cleanness...
Jesus had cured the leper—not with his word only, which would have been enough for the mere cure, but was not enough without the touch of his hand to satisfy the heart of Jesus—a touch defiling him, in the notion of the Jews, but how cleansing to the sense of the leper!
The anger of a good man is a very different thing from the anger of a bad man; the displeasure of Jesus must be a very different thing from the displeasure of a tyrant. But they are both anger, both displeasure, nevertheless...
God may forgive and punish; and he may punish and not forgive, that he may rescue. To forgive the sin against the holy spirit would be to damn the universe to the pit of lies, to render it impossible for the man so forgiven ever to be saved...
He who chooses to go on sinning annihilates my forgiveness. If a man refuses to come out of his sin, he must suffer the vengeance of a love that would be no love if it left him there...
It does not follow, because light has come into the world, that it has fallen upon this or that man. He has his portion of the light that lighteth every man, but the revelation of God in Christ may not yet have reached him...
It may sound paradoxical, but no man is condemned for anything he has done; he is condemned for continuing to do wrong. He is condemned for not coming out of the darkness, for not coming to the light...
Do not try to believe anything that affects thee as darkness. Even if thou mistake and refuse something true thereby, thou wilt do less wrong to Christ by such a refusal than thou wouldst by accepting as his what thou canst see only as darkness...
Come to God, then, my brother, my sister, with all thy desires and instincts, all thy lofty ideals, all thy longing for purity and unselfishness, all thy yearning to love and be true...
All men will not, in our present imperfection, see the same light; but light is light notwithstanding, and what each does see, is his safety if he obeys it...
Where would the good news be if John said, “God is light, but you cannot see his light; you cannot tell, you have no notion, what light is; what God means by light, is not what you mean by light; what God calls light may be horrible darkness to you...
Too many regard the father of their spirits as their governor! They yield the idea of the Ancient of Days, “the glad creator,” and put in its stead a miserable, puritanical martinet of a God...
It may be asked of me, “Do I believe that the sufferings of Christ, as sufferings, justified the supreme ruler in doing anything which he would not have been at liberty to do but for those sufferings?” I do not...
