"The distinction between Christianity and all other systems of religion consists largely in this, that in these others men are found seeking after God, while Christianity is God seeking after men."

Thomas Arnold, English educator; father of Matthew Arnold (1795-1842)

"Christ did not enchant men; He demanded that they believe in Him: except on one occasion, the Transfiguration. For a brief while, Peter, James, and John were permitted to see Him in His glory. For that brief while they had no need of faith. The vision vanished, and the memory of it did not prevent them from all forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever known Him."

W. H. Auden, US (English-born) critic and poet; (1907-1973) in A Certain World [1971]

"Christ is not valued at all unless He is valued above all."

Augustine of Hippo

"Someone quoting the hackneyed sarcasm that "between Protestantism and Romanism there is but a paper wall," the reply was, "True, but the whole Bible is printed on it."

Paul Bonchard


"Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you yourself shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God."

Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

"Whomever the Lord has adopted and deemed worthy of his fellowship ought to prepare themselves for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with very many and various kinds of evil. It is the Heavenly Father's will thus to exercise them so as to put his own children to a definite test. Beginning with Christ, his first-born, he follows this plan with all his children."

John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion [1559]
 
"Some major churches overemphasize the importance of preaching as a means to increase 
membership and fail to reach out with compassion to their neighbors in need."

Jimmy Carter

"Christianity is rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train."

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.277

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."

G.K. Chesterton

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."

G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World, pt. 1, ch. 5, 1910

"At least five times, . . . with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died."

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1925, p. 254

"Today's marginalization of Christianity is a direct result of our failure to understand our faith as a total worldview."

Charles Colson

"Jesus Christ is both the only price and sacrifice by which eternal redemption is obtained for believers."

Jonathan Edwards, Rational Biblical Theology vol. III: Appendix: Gal 3

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."

Jim Elliot

"Live as though Christ died yesterday, rose from the grave today, and is coming back tomorrow."

Theodore Epp

"Wherever (Christianity) has gone it has rebuked oppression, repressed violence, and compelled vice, abashed, to skulk in darkness. It has given to us, as a nation, the free institutions which command the admiration and excite the hopes of the downtrodden in all lands. It has given to Christendom the power which it now exercises over the destiny of the whole world."

Moses Hoge

"To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious."

Soren Kierkegaard, Journal, 1847

"One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. And sooner than that I should seek escape from the sacred necessity that is laid upon me, let the breath of life fail me. It is this: That in spite of all worldly opposition, God's holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in the State for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God."

Abraham Kuyper, 1897

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and sink. I needn't argue about that. I'm right and will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first - rock'n'roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

John Lennon, 4th March 1966


"I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity."

C. S. Lewis

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

C.S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?"

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."

C.S. Lewis 

"In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the 
poem itself."

C.S. Lewis
"The whole history of Christianity proves that she has little indeed to fear from 
persecution as a foe, but much to fear from persecution as an ally."

Thomas B. Macaulay

"The Christian cannot be satisfied so long as any human activity is either opposed to Christianity or out of connection with Christianity. Christianity must pervade not merely all nations but also all of human thought."

J. Gresham Machen

"Mahomet established a religion by putting his enemies to death; Jesus Christ by commanding his followers to lay down their lives."

Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, and theologian (1623-1662)

"Jesus was in a garden, not of delight as the first Adam, in which he destroyed himself and the whole human race, but in one of agony, in which he saved himself and the whole human race."

Blaise Pascal

"We would be much worse without Christianity; but we wouldn't know it."

Joseph Sobran

"The words of Jesus, including those Jefferson and the Jesus Seminar have blue-pencilled, have a unique permanence. They don't merely survive as aphoristic wisdom; they have an authority in our hearts, even when we try to deny them. They command. We can obey or rebel. That is why Jesus is still not only loved but hated -- and why those who hate him feel they have to profess to love him."

Joseph Sobran, (4/2/96)

"Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even 
surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - 
has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and 
without it has no significance or power to command allegiance ... It is no longer 
possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at 
the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests ... Christianity ... is in 
greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries."

Evlyn Waugh, 1930
"The renewal of our natures is a work of great importance. It is not to be done in a day. 
We have not only a new house to build up, but an old one to pull down."

George Whitefield, letter of March 6, 1735
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