Life is not found in commandments or declarations of penalties, but in the promise of mercy and only in a gratuitous promise.

For what is idolatry if not this: to worship the gifts in place of the Giver himself?

Those who fall away have never been thoroughly imbued with the knowledge of Christ but only had a slight and passing taste of it.

For even if the Word in His immeasurable essence united with the nature of man into one person, we do not imagine that He was confined therein. Here is something marvellous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, He willed to be borne in the virgin's womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet He continuously filled the world even as He had done from the beginning.

At this day . . . the earth sustains on her bosom many monster minds, minds which are not afraid to employ the seed of Deity deposited in human nature as a means of suppressing the name of God. Can anything be more detestable than this madness in man, who, finding God a hundred times both in his body and his soul, makes his excellence in this respect a pretext for denying that there is a God? He will not say that chance has made him different from the brutes; . . . but, substituting Nature as the architect of the universe, he suppresses the name of God.

While all men seek after happiness, scarcely one in a hundred looks for it from God.

For our hearts are enfeebled by prosperity, so that we cannot make the effort to pray.