"It may be a merit of our present age that in many ways it has known how to work the wish weary and in that way to wean the soul from wishing; it may be to its advantage if it thereby has developed an honest earnestness that for the good renounces the fraudulence of wishes. We do not reproach the age for having made the idea of the power of the wish into playing with words if it thereby motivates someone to work with his own hands instead of with the borrowed energy of the wish. But the wish for heaven’s salvation-is this, too, a play on words, as wishing for heavenly help has become for the frivolous, who thinks that we ought to depend on God the way we depend on people –that is, if you help yourself then God does the rest. And if the wish for heaven’s salvation has become playing with words, has the aim in it been to incite people to work all the harder to gain it? This seems not at all to be the case."
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Three_Upbuilding_Discourses%2C_1844
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Three Upbuilding Discourses, 1844
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