Quotes from black hugh b ii

Christianity does not condemn any natural human feeling, but it will not let these interfere with present duty and destroy future usefulness. It does not send men to search for the purpose of living in the graves of their dead hopes and pleasures. Its disciples must not attempt to live on the relics of even great incidents, among crucifixes and tombs. In the Desert, the heart must reach forward to the Promised Land, and not back to Egypt.

Death is the great argument for immortality. We cannot believe that the living, loving soul has ceased to be. We cannot believe that all those treasures of mind and heart are squandered in empty air. We will not believe it. When once we understand the meaning of the spiritual, we see the absolute certainty of eternal life; we need no arguments for the persistence of being.

All life is an argument for death.

Instead of being narrow and dismal, religion is the biggest and brightest thing that can come into a man's life, transforming every power and inspiring every energy, bathing it in peace and flooding it with joy.

The lesson of life is love: the test of life is love: the task of life is the perfecting of love. Life blossoms into its natural fruition in love, as a flower blossoms in light. To dwell in love is to dwell in God and to have God dwelling in us.

Problems abound, but the manly and healthy view is that they exist to be bravely faced, and if possible solved.

The secret of friendship is just the secret of all spiritual blessing. The way to get is to give.

An uninterested spectator sees nothing; or, what is worse, sees wrongly.

Fear as a motive can always be counted on to have its deterring, restraining force, but no life is safe which is only ruled by fear.

Influence is the greatest of all human gifts, and we all have it in some measure. There are some to whom we are something, if not everything. There are some, who are grappled to us with hoops of steel. There are some, over whom we have ascendency, or at least to whom we have access, who have opened the gates of the City of Mansoul to us, some we can sway with a word, a touch, a look. It must always be a solemn thing for a man to ask what he has done with this dread power of influence.

Sorrow rightly used may often give insight, forcing the mind to think and the eye to see; just as disease may read us many a lesson.

To every soul of man the way to freedom is through submission. We must obey before we can command.

It is always a temptation, which grows stronger the longer we live, to look back instead of forward, to bemoan the past, and thus deride the present and distrust the future.

It is even a common notion that duty is precisely what we do not like. If there is any doubt, the safe rule is to find out what will be pleasant, and do the opposite! It does often happen that duty asks for sacrifice and demands the hard thing rather than the easy one, but to make pain a test of duty is to turn the world topsy-turvy.

Is it the thought of a dreamer to imagine that yet the love of God will so grip men's hearts that the love of men will be the natural motive of all our action?

Disease and sorrow exist, but health is the normal, and joy is the natural, and it is a privilege to live.

All forms of disunion are of the devil.