It seems to me that any lover of the gospel can hardly have failed to feel dissatisfaction with the close of the third verse of John 1: “All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” That it is no worse than redundant can be no satisfaction to the man who would find perfection, if he may, in the words of him who was nearer the Lord than any other....

Perhaps the Son is saying to the Father, “Thy little ones need some wind and rain: their buds are hard; the flowers do not come out. I cannot get them made blessed without a little more winter weather.” Then perhaps the Father will say, “Comfort them, my son Jesus, with the memory of thy patience when thou wast missing me.”...

When a man truly and perfectly says with Jesus, “Thy will be done,” he closes the ever-lasting life circle; the life of the Father and the Son flows through him; he is a part of the divine organism. Then is the prayer of the Lord in him fulfilled: “I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” The Christ in us is the spirit of the perfect child toward the perfect father, our own true nature made to blossom in us by the Lord, whose life is the light of men that it may become the life of men; for our true nature is childhood to the Father....

The question is not at present, however, of removing mountains, a thing that will one day be simple to us, but of waking and rising from the dead now...

The bond of the universe, the harmony of things, the negation of difference, the fact at the root of every vision, revealing that love is the only good in the world, and selfishness the one thing hateful, in the city of the loving God, is the devotion of the Son to the Father....

Let us not forget that the devotion of the Son could never have been but for the devotion of the Father, who never seeks his own glory one atom more than does the Son; who is devoted to the Son, and to all his sons and daughters, with a devotion perfect and eternal, with fathomless unselfishness. 

There is always something deeper than anything said, something through which the central reality shines more or less plainly. Light itself is but the poor outside form of a deeper, better thing, namely, life. The life is Christ...

We must be sons and daughters in our will. And we can be such only by choosing God for the father he is, and doing his will. Therein lies human bliss. The working out of this our salvation must be pain, but the eternal form of the will of God in and for us, is intensity of bliss...

Jesus rose to the height of his being, set himself down on the throne of his nature, in the act of subjecting himself to the will of the Father as his only good, the only reason of his existence...