For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. - George MacDonald

We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments....Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.

What distressed me most — more even than my own folly — was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?

The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt,
In that fear doubteth thee.