Frederick William Robertson (3 February 1816 – 15 August 1853), known as Robertson of Brighton, was an English divine.
The Christian life is not knowing or hearing, but doing.
It is more true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and habits, than to say that our lives and habits depend on our opinions.
Every unfulfilled aspiration of humanity in the past; all partial representation of perfect character; all sacrifices, nay, even those of idolatry, point to the fulfillment of what want, the answer to every longing--the type of perfect humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ.
There is a power in the soul, quite separate from the intellect, which sweeps away or recognizes the marvelous, by which God is felt. Faith stands serenely far above the reach of the atheism of science. It does not rest on the wonderful, but on the eternal wisdom and goodness of God. The revelation of the Son was to proclaim a Father, not a mystery. No science can sweep away the everlasting love which the heart feels, and which the intellect does not even pretend to judge or recognize.
Two thousand years ago there was One here on this earth who lived the grandest life that ever has been lived yet - a life that every thinking man, with deeper or shallower meaning, has agreed to call divine.
Every day His servants are dying modestly and peacefully--not a word of victory on their lips; but Christ's deep triumph in their hearts--watching the slow progress of their own decay, and yet so far emancipated from personal anxiety that they are still able to think and plan for others, not knowing that they are doing any great thing. They die, and the world hears nothing of them; and yet theirs was the completest victory. They came to the battle field, the field to which they had been looking forward all their lives, and the enemy was not to be found. There was no foe to fight with.
It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that insures your growth.
Poetry creates life; Science dissects death.
Heaven begun is the living proof that makes the heaven to come credible. Christ in you is "the hope of glory. " It is the eagle eye of faith which penetrates the grave, and sees far into the tranquil things of death. He alone can believe in immortality who feels the resurrection in him already.
To grieve over sin is one thing, to repent is another.
God's truth is too sacred to be expounded to superficial worldliness in its transient fit of earnestness.
Earth has not a spectacle more glorious or more fair to show than this love tolerating intolerance; charity covering, as with a vail, even the sin of the lack of charity.
He in whose heart the law was, and who alone of all mankind was content to do it, His sacrifice alone can be the sacrifice all-sufficient in the Father's sight as the proper sacrifice of humanity; He who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, He alone can give the Spirit which enables us to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. He is the only High-Priest of the universe.
It is the law of our humanity that man must know good through evil. No great principle ever triumphed but through much evil. No man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes.
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
As the tree is fertilized by its own broken branches and fallen leaves, and grows out of its own decay, so men and nations are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.
This is the ministry and its work--not to drill hearts and minds and consciences into right forms of thought and mental postures, but to guide to the living God who speaks.
We win by tenderness. We conquer by forgiveness.
The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves: self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort never can be.
Time and pains will do anything.