Clergyman Quotes

There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility.

The Synod of Bishops has existed for forty years. In that long span of time it has been for all of us a good school for introducing us to the universal dimension of the Church.

The mission proper to the Church is that of proclaiming the Gospel.

The interest in the supernatural in a very generic sense and in the spiritual is not in itself a factor that helps the communication of the Christian faith.

I believe that Orthodoxy has been thinking lately, and despite other impressions, that we can't have full sacramental communion if we don't first have a fundamental agreement on the question of the primacy, that still isn't there.

For the future, I would suggest avoiding subjects of too vast a scale. It would be useful to make out a list of fundamental questions on the matter to be dealt with, and discuss only those.

Common participation in the Eucharist can only be a final outcome of ecumenic dialogue, not the starting point.

Christians who have influence in political life must feel as individuals responsibility in front of their own faith. And the duty of encouraging laws that are not in contradiction with the Commandments comes within the mission of the Church.

But when one identifies the Church with a cultural and political bloc, there is the danger of making difficult the Church's contact with all those outside the bloc.

What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?

This, and this alone, is Christianity, a universal holiness in every part of life, a heavenly wisdom in all our actions, not conforming to the spirit and temper of the world but turning all worldly enjoyments into means of piety and devotion to God.

Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state.

Perfection does not consist in any singular state or condition of life, or in any particular set of duties, but in holy and religious conduct of ourselves in every state of Life.

No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress.

Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light.

Ask what Time is, it is nothing else but something of eternal duration become finite, measurable and transitory.

Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.

Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world; dwell in love, and then you dwell in God.

Humility is nothing else but a right judgment of ourselves.

Faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us, so it attracts and unites with its like.

All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness.

God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue.

Death is not more certainly a separation of our souls from our bodies than the Christian life is a separation of our souls from worldly tempers, vain indulgences, and unnecessary cares.

We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.

He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.

Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love.

If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.

Be intent upon the perfection of the present day.

The Lord receive my soul, and have mercy on me, and bless this kingdom with peace and charity, that there may not be this effusion of Christian blood amongst them.