To those who call themselves Christians, but weep such hopeless tears: do you not believe that God is unchangeable, but think he acts one way one time and another way another time just from caprice?
When any have husband, son, father, brother, or lover are taken from them, is it but the cold frost of use and forgetting that makes them less miserable than they were a year ago?
It was hard upon Lazarus, but he must come and bear the Lord company a little longer, and then be left behind with his sisters, that they and millions more might know that God is the God of the living, and not of the dead...
The trouble of the Lord was that his friends would not trust his father. He did not want any reception of himself that was not a reception of his father—hewho did the works!
They wept as those who believe in death, not in life. What was to be done with his brother and sisters who would be miserable, who would not believe in his father!
The Lord had all this time been trying to teach his friends about his father, who had sent him that men might look on his very likeness, and all they had gained by it seemed not to amount to an atom of consolation when the touch of death came...
[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...
