"Consult the honor of religion more, and your personal safety less. Is it for the honor of religion (think you) that Christians should be as timorous as hares to start at every sound?"

"See that you receive Christ with all your heart. As there is nothing in Christ that may be refused, so there is nothing in you from which He must be excluded."

"You are not to come to Christ because you are qualified, but that you may be qualified with whatever you want; and the best qualification you can bring is a deep sense that you have no worth or excellency at all in you."

"No friend sympathizes so tenderly with his friend in affliction as does Jesus. "In all our afflictions, He is afflicted." He feels all our sorrows, wants, and burdens as His own. Whence it is that the sufferings of believers are called the sufferings of Christ."

"When a man begins to apprehend the first approach of grace, pardon, and mercy by Jesus Christ to his soul; when he is convinced of his utter unworthiness and desert of hell, and can never expect any thing from a just and holy God but damnation, how do the first dawnings of mercy melt and humble him!"

"God kills thy comforts from no other design but to kill thy corruptions; wants are ordained to kill wantonness, poverty is appointed to kill pride, reproaches are permitted to destroy ambition."

"Here you may suppose the Father to say when driving His bargain with Christ for you. The Father speaks. "My Son, here is a company of poor, miserable souls that have utterly undone themselves and now lay open to my justice. Justice demands satisfaction for them, or will satisfy itself in the eternal ruin of them." The Son responds. "Oh my Father. Such is my love to and pity for them, that rather than they shall perish eternally I will be responsible for them as their guarantee. Bring in all thy bills, that I may see what they owe thee. Bring them all in, that there be no after-reckonings with them. At my hands shall thou require it. I would rather choose to suffer the wrath that is theirs then they should suffer it. Upon me, my Father, upon me be all their debt." The Father responds. "But my Son, if thou undertake for them, thou must reckon to pay the last mite. Expect no abatement. Son, if I spare them... I will not spare you." The Son responds. "Content Father. Let it be so. Charge it all upon me. I am able to discharge it. And though it prove a kind of undoing to me, though it impoverish all my riches, empty all my treasures... I am content to take it.""

"The greatest difficulty in conversion is to win the heart to God and after conversion to keep it with Him."

"They foresaw that the concession of a Providence would impose an eternal yoke upon their necks, by making them accountable for all they did to a higher tribunal, so that they must necessarily 'pass the time of their sojourning here in fear', while all their thoughts, words and ways were strictly noted and recorded, for the purpose of an account by an all-seeing and righteous God. They therefore laboured to persuade themselves that what they had no mind for did not exist."

"When God gives you comforts, it is your great evil not to observe His hand in them."

"Take Christ in with you under your yoke, and let patience have her perfect work."

"[A]t ye entrie of ye said Maister Samuell, our soules were under that miserable extreame femine of ye word, that we had onlie ye puir help of an sermone everie second Sabboth, by reasone of ane most inconvenient unione with uther twa kirkis."

"He had a most sharp pierceing witt, and fruitfall invention and solid judgement. He used ordinarly to rise be three a clock in the morning; he spent all his time either in prayer, or reading, or writting, or in visiting families in private, or in publick employments of his ministrie or profession. While he was at Anwoth, he was the instrument of much good among a poor ignorant people, many of which he brought to the knowledge and practise of religion, and was a great strengthener of all the Christians in that countrey."

"But no sooner did the restoration of Charles II. take place, than the face of affairs began to change, and after his fore-mentioned book lex rex was burnt at the cross of Edinburgh, and at the gates of the new college of St Andrews, where he was professor of divinity, the parliament in 1661, were to have an indictment laid before them against him, and such was their humanity (that when every body knew he was a-dying) that they caused summon him to appear before them at Edinburgh, to answer to a charge of high treason... It is commonly said, that when the summons came he spoke out of his bed and said, Tell them I have got summons already before a superior judge and judicatory, and I behove to answer my first summons, and ere your day come I will be where few kings and great folks come. When they returned and told he was a-dying, the parliament put to a vote, Whether or not to let him die in the college. It carried, Put him out, only a few dissenting. My lord Burleigh said, Ye have voted that honest man out of the college, but ye cannot vote him out of heaven. Some said, He would never win there, hell was too good for him. Burleigh said, I wish I were as sure of heaven as he is, I would think myself happy to get a grip of his sleeve to hawl me in."

"If you should see a man shut up in a closed room, idoizing a set of lamps and rejoicing in their light, and you wished to make him truly happy, you would begin by blowing out all his lamps; and then throw open the shutters to let in the light of heaven."

"A power ethical, politic, or moral, to oppress, is not from God, and is not a power, but a licentious deviation of a power; and is no more from God, but from sinful nature and the old serpent."

"Make not Christ a liar in distrusting His promise."

"If ye never had a sick night and a pained soul for sin, ye have not yet lighted upon Christ."

"It is in some respect greater love in Jesus to sanctify than to justify, for He maketh us most like Himself, in His own essential portraiture and image in sanctifying us."

"I pray God that I may never find my will again. Oh, that Christ would subject my will to His, and trample it under His feet."

"Grow as a palm-tree on God's Mount Zion; howbeit shaken with winds, yet the root is fast."

"I know that as night and shadows are good for flowers, and moonlight and dews are better than a continual sun, so is Christ's absence of special use, and that it hath some nourishing virtue in it, and giveth sap to humility, and putteth an edge on hunger, and furnisheth a fair field for faith to put forth itself."

"It is certain that this is not only good which the Almighty has done, but that it is best; He hath reckoned all your steps to heaven."

"There is nothing left to us but to see how we may be approved of Him, and how we may roll the weight of our weak souls in well-doing upon Him, who is God omnipotent."

"It is no small comfort that God hath written some Scriptures to you which He hath not to others. Read these, and think God is like a friend who sendeth a letter to a whole house and family, but who speaketh in His letter to some by name that are dearest to Him in the house."

"When ye are come to the other side of the water, and have set down your foot on the shore ot glorious eternity, and look back again to the waters and to your wearisome journey, and shall see in that clear glass of endless glory, nearer to the bottom of God's wisdom, ye shall then be forced to say, " If God had done otherwise with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoyment of this crown of glory.""

"Be not cast down. If ye saw Him who is standing on the shore, holding out His arms to welcome you to land, ye would wade, not only through a sea of wrongs, but through hell itself to be with Him."

"Build your nest upon no tree here, for ye see that God hath sold the forest to death."

"How soon would faith freeze without a cross!"

"Welcome, welcome, cross of Christ, if Christ be with it."

"You must take a house beside the Physician. It will be a miracle if ye be the first sick that Christ hath put away uncured."

"Christ seeketh your help in your place; give Him your hand."

"Christ, in that place He hath put you, hath intrusted you with a dear pledge, which is His own glory, and hath armed you with His sword to keep the pledge, and make a good account of it to God."

"There is nothing that will make you a Christian indeed, but a taste of the sweetness of Christ."

"I find my Lord Jesus cometh not in the precise way that I lay wait for Him. He hath a manner of His own. Oh, how high are His ways above my ways"

"Every day we may see some new thing in Christ. His love hath neither brim nor bottom."

"In our fluctuations of feeling, it is well to remember that Jesus admits no change in His affections; your heart is not the compass Jesus saileth by."

"My desire is that my Lord would give me broader and deeper thoughts, to feed myself with wondering at His love."

"Dearest wife, let us go on and faint not; something of ours is in heaven besides the flesh of our exalted Saviour, and we go on after our own."

"Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them."

"Ye have lost a child — nay, she is not lost to you, who is found to Christ; she is not sent away, but only sent before; like unto a star, which going out of our sight, doth not die and vanish, but shineth in another hemisphere."

"Grace will ever speak for itself and be fruitful in well-doing; the sanctified cross is a fruitful tree."

"The night will close the door & fasten my anchor within the veil and I shall go away to sleep."

"The good Husbandman may pluck His rose & gather in His lily."

"The bloom fell off my branches and joy did cast off its flower"

"I had but one joy, the apple of the eye of my delights , to preach Christ my Lord"

"I hang by a thread, but it is (if I may so speak) of Christ's spinning"

"ye and I might meet with joy up in the rainbow"

"I see grace growth best in winter"

"Like a fool as I was , I suffered my sun to be high in the heavens and near afternoon before I ever took the gate by the end."