It is easy to be a slave to the letter, and difficult to enter into the spirit; easy to obey a number of outward rules, difficult to enter intelligently and self-sacrificingly into the will of God.
Frederic FarrarSeneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.
Frederic FarrarLittle self-denials, little honesties, little passing words of sympathy, little nameless acts of kindness, little silent victories over favorite temptations-these are the silent threads of gold which, when woven together, gleam out so brightly in the pattern of life that God approves.
Frederic FarrarConcerning the prayer that mountains fall to crush and hide, Farrar , says: "These words of Christ met with a painfully literal illustration when hundreds of the unhappy Jews at the siege of Jerusalem hid themselves in the darkest and vilest subterranean recesses, and when, besides those who were hunted out, no less than two thousand were killed by being buried under the ruins of their hiding places."
Frederic FarrarNo true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. Oh, understand those two perverted word, failure and success and measure them by the eternal, not the earthly, standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be pre-eminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross -- was that a failure.
Frederic Farrar