Now rejoice, all ye powers of my soul, that you are so united with God that no one may separate you from Him. I cannot fully praise nor love Him therefore must I die, and cast myself into the divine void, till I rise from non-existence to existence. . . . While I am here, He is in me; after this life, I am in Him.
Whilst Elizabeth imposed so rigorous a restraint upon her own senses, and treated herself with such unremitting severity, her heart overflowed with charity and mercy towards her unfortunate fellow beings. The tender charity which had always animated her, from her earliest childhood, grew deeper with each day of her life;
In 664 a meeting was held at Whitby to discuss the date upon which Easter should be celebrated. Why discuss this old debate now? Partly out of love of the northern kingdom where it happened and of the writer who tells about it; but more than that, because the debate about Easter at Whitby in 664 shows how easily a secular appeal to uniformity can be confused with a theological concern for unity
In November 1197 there came a demand from the king for three hundred knights, or money sufficient to hire as many mercenaries, to serve against Philip of France. The archbishop convened a council of bishops and barons at Oxford, where the Bishop of London, speaking as dean of the province, declared his willingness to comply with the demand. Not so the holy Bishop of Lincoln.
Nor need we wonder that the queen governed herself and her household wisely when we know that she herself acted under the wisest of masters, the guidance of the Holy Scriptures. I myself have had frequent opportunities of admiring in her how, even amidst the distractions of lawsuits, amidst the countless cares of state, she devoted herself with wonderful assiduity to the word of God, about which she used to ask profound questions from the learned men who were sitting near her.
Let us consider what it is to live godly in Christ Jesus. This supposes that we are made the righteousness of God in Christ, that we are born again, and are one with Christ by a living faith, and a vital union, even as Jesus Christ and the Father are One. Unless we are thus converted, and transformed by the renewing of our minds, we cannot properly be said to be in Christ, much less to live godly in him.
Death comes to either the soul or the body. The soul cannot die, and yet it can die. It cannot die, because its consciousness is never lost. It can die, if it loses God. You see, just as the soul itself is the life of the body, so in the same way God is the life of the soul. As the body dies when the soul that is its life abandons it, in the same way when God abandons the soul, it dies
Seabury was a hard-working bishop, in marked contrast to some others of his day in England and America. He was also a straightforward man, who could observe with regard to confirmation that “it is unreasonable to expect that people should comply with a rite before they are convinced of their obligation to do so.”
In different ages of the world it has pleased God to reveal himself to men in different ways; sometimes by visions, sometimes by voices, sometimes by suggestions of his Spirit to their minds: but since the completion of the sacred canon, he has principally made use of his written word, explained and enforced by men, whom he has called and qualified to preach his Gospel;
An ex-soldier like the Egyptian pioneer Pachomius, Martin abandoned his military career in Gaul (France) to live a life apart from the world. Around him, probably in the year 361, there gathered the West’s first known monastic community at what seems to have been an ancient local cultic site in a marshy valley, now called Ligugé.