Quote#God & Faith
The sense that a man is serving a Higher than himself, with a service…
Quote byJohn Campbell Shairp · 1819–1885
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Culture and Religion (1870), Lecture III. "The Literary Theory of Culture", pp. 62–63..
English (original)
The sense that a man is serving a Higher than himself, with a service which will become ever more and more perfect freedom, evokes more profound, more humbling, more exalted emotions than any thing else in the world can do. The spirit of man is an instrument which cannot give out its deepest, finest tones, except under the immediate hand of the Divine Harmonist.
— John Campbell Shairp
More from John Campbell Shairp
There is perhaps no truer sign that a man is really advancing than that he is learning to forget himself, that he is losing the natural thoughts about self in the thought of One higher than himself, to whose guidance he can commit himself …
Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimate of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness.
The ground of all religion, that which makes it possible, is the relation in which the human soul stands to God.
They who seek religion for culture-sake are æsthetic, not religious, and will never gain that grace which religion adds to culture, because they never can have the religion.
Beauty comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself.
The main condition is that the spiritual ear should be open to overhear and patiently take in, and the will ready to obey that testimony which, I believe, God bears in every human heart, however dull, to those great truths which the Bible …