It's not my business to try and make God think like me. . . but to try, in prayer and penitence, to think like God.
Don't offer God partnership when he wants penitence. Don't present him with lip service when He wants your life.
He who is penitent is almost innocent.
Our preaching does not stop with the law. That would lead to wounding without binding up, striking down and not healing, killing and not making alive, driving down to hell and not bringing back up, humbling and not exalting. Therefore, we must also preach grace and the promise of forgiveness--this is the means by which faith is awakened and properly taught. Without this word of grace, the law, contrition, penitence, and everything else are done and taught in vain.
The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.
Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?
There must be room for penitence to mend Life's broken chance; else noise of wars would unmake heaven.
If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?
The inward sighs of humble penitence Rise to the ear of Heaven, when peal'd hymns Are scatter'd with the sounds of common air.
