John Campbell Shairp Quotes

We are not called on to believe this or that doctrine which may be proposed to us till we can do so from honest conviction. But we are called on to trust—to trust ourselves to God, being sure that He will lead us right—to keep close to Him—and to trust the promises which He whispers through our conscience; this we can do, and we ought to do.

Were it not well then to begin with the substance, to learn to apprehend the reality of that kingdom which is all around us now, whether we recognize it or not—to take our aims and endeavors into it that they may be made part of it, however small—to surrender ourselves to it, that our lives may do something towards its advancement, and that so we may become fellow-workers, however humble, with all the wise and good who have gone before us, and with Him who made them what they were?

Criticism is not religion, and by no process can it be substituted for it. It is not the critic's eye but the child's heart that most truly discerns the countenance that looks out from the pages of the Gospel.

That image, or rather that Person, so human, yet so entirely divine, has a power to fill the imagination, to arrest the affections, to deepen and purify the conscience, which nothing else in the world has.

[I]t is quite certain that if from childhood men were to begin to follow the first intimations of conscience, honestly to obey them and carry them out into act, the power of conscience would be so strengthened and improved within them, that it would soon become, what it evidently is intended to be, "a connecting principle between the creature and the Creator."

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.