Philip Schaff Quotes & Sayings

If Christians are ever to be united, they must be united in Christ, their living head and the source of their spiritual life. — Philip Schaff

For where grace is, there is a remitting, and where remitting is, there is no punishment. Punishment then being removed, and righteousness succeeding from faith, there is no obstacle to our becoming heirs of the promise. — Philip Schaff

Christianity is not only the revelation of truth, but also the fountain of holiness under the unceasing inspiration of the spotless example of its Founder, which is more powerful than all the systems of moral philosophy. It attests its divine origin as much by its moral workings as by its pure doctrines. By its own inherent energy, without noise and commotion, without the favor of circumstance - nay, in spite of all possible obstacles, it has gradually wrought the greatest moral reformation, we should rather say, regeneration of society which history has ever seen while its purifying, ennobling, and cheering effects upon the private life of countless individuals are beyond the reach of the historian, though recorded in God's book of life to be opened on the day of judgment. To appreciate this work, we must first review the moral condition of heathenism in its mightiest embodiment in history. — Philip Schaff

Every church, yea, every truth and every good cause, has its martyrs, who stood the fiery trial and sacrificed comfort and life itself to their sacred convictions. The blood of martyrs is the seed of toleration; toleration is the seed of liberty; and liberty is the most precious gift of God to every man who has been made in his image and redeemed by Christ. — Philip Schaff

The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times. — Philip Schaff

More Christian blood has been shed by Christians than by heathens and Mohammedans. — Philip Schaff

Who touches money touches dirt; and the less religion has to do with it, the better. — Philip Schaff

Christ himself wrote nothing, but furnished endless material for books and songs of gratitude and praise. — Philip Schaff

Our best feelings, which God himself has planted in our hearts, instinctively revolt against the thought that a God of infinite love and justice should create millions of immortal beings in his own image - probably more than half of the human race - in order to hurry them from the womb to the tomb, and from the tomb to everlasting doom! — Philip Schaff

Henceforth we find woman no longer a slave of man and tool of lust, but the pride and joy of her husband, the fond mother training her children to virtue and godliness, the ornament and treasure of the family, the faithful sister, the zealous servant of the congregation in every work of Christian charity, the sister of mercy, the martyr with superhuman courage, the guardian angel of peace, the example of purity, humility, gentleness, patience, love, and fidelity unto death. Such women were unknown before. The heathen Libanius, the enthusiastic eulogist of old Grecian culture, pronounced an involuntary eulogy on Christianity when he exclaimed, as he looked at the mother of Chrysostom: "What women the Christians have! — Philip Schaff

There is prepossession on either side of the controversy, the one positive, the other negative, and history itself must decide between them. The facts must rule philosophy, not philosophy the facts. If it can be made out that the life of Christ and the apostolic church can be psychologically and historically explained only by the admission of the supernatural element which they claim, while every other explanation only increases the difficulty, of the problem and substitutes an unnatural miracle for a supernatural one, the historian has gained the case, and it is for the philosopher to adjust his theory to history. The duty of the historian is not to make the facts, but to discover them, and then to construct his theory wide enough to give them all comfortable room. — Philip Schaff

Jesus Christ is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all. In the Gospels he walks in human form upon the earth, and accomplishes the work of redemption. — Philip Schaff

Those who make pictures of the Savior, who is God as well as man in one inseparable person, either limit the incomprehensible Godhead to the bounds of created flesh, or confound his two natures like Eutyches, or separate them, like Nestorius, or deny his Godhead, like Arius; and those who worship such a picture are guilty of the same heresy and blasphemy. — Philip Schaff

The apostolic writings are of three kinds: historical, didactic, and prophetic. — Philip Schaff

Religion and liberty are inseparable. Religion is voluntary, and cannot, and ought not to be forced. This is a fundamental article of the American creed, without distinction of sect or party. Liberty, both civil and religious, is an American instinct. Such liberty is impossible on the basis of a union of church and state, where the one of necessity restricts or controls the other. It requires a friendly separation, where each power is entirely independent in its own sphere. — Philip Schaff

John was not a logician, but a seer; not a reasoner, but a mystic; he does not argue, but assert; he arrives at conclusions with one bound, as by direct intuition. — Philip Schaff

The person of Christ is to me the greatest and surest of all facts. — Philip Schaff

The Calvinistic system involves a positive truth: the election to eternal life by free grace, and the negative inference: the reprobation to eternal death by arbitrary justice. The former is the strength, the latter is the weakness of the system. The former is practically accepted by all true believers; the latter always has been, and always will be, repelled by the great majority of Christians. — Philip Schaff

One man with truth on his side is stronger than a majority in error, and will conquer in the end. — Philip Schaff

It is more than a book, it is an institution which rules the Christian world. — Philip Schaff

The dark picture which St. Paul, in addressing the Romans, draws of the heathenism of his day, is fully sustained by Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, Persius, and other heathen writers of that age, and shows the absolute need of redemption. "The world," says Seneca, in a famous passage, "is full of crimes and vices. More are committed than can be cured by force. There is an immense struggle for iniquity. Crimes are no longer bidden, but open before the eyes. Innocence is not only rare, but nowhere."83 — Philip Schaff

And the Church is directed to send the gospel to every creature. We pray for the salvation of all men, but not for the loss of a single human being. Christ interceded even for his murderers on the cross. Here, then, is a practical difficulty. The decree of reprobation cannot be made an object of prayer or preaching, and this is an argument against it. Experience confirms election, but repudiates reprobation. — Philip Schaff

Calvinism emphasizes divine sovereignty and free grace; Arminianism emphasizes human responsibility. The one restricts the saving grace to the elect; the other extends it to all men on the condition of faith. Both are right in what they assert; both are wrong in what they deny. If one important truth is pressed to the exclusion of another truth of equal importance, it becomes an error, and loses its hold upon the conscience. The Bible gives us a theology which is more human than Calvinism and more divine than Arminianism, and more Christian than either of them. — Philip Schaff

We find everywhere in this world the traces of a revealed God and of a hidden God; revealed enough to strengthen our faith, concealed enough to try our faith. — Philip Schaff

The history of the Church is the rise and progress of the kingdom of heaven upon earth, for the glory of God and the salvation of the world. — Philip Schaff

Charles Wesley fully sided with the Arminianism of his brother John, and abused his poetic gift by writing poor doggerel against Calvinism.847 He had a bitter controversy on the subject with Toplady, who was a devout Calvinist. But their theological controversy is dead and buried, while their devotional hymns still live, and Calvinists and Methodists heartily join in singing Wesley's "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," and Toplady's "Rock of Ages, cleft for me. — Philip Schaff

The New Testament presents, in its way, the same union of the divine and human as the person of Christ. In this sense also 'the word became flesh, and dwells among us.' — Philip Schaff

The living Church of the redeemed is his book. He founded a religion of the living spirit, not of a written code, like the Mosaic law. Yet his words and deeds are recorded by as honest and reliable witnesses as ever put pen to paper. — Philip Schaff

belonged to the respectable class of society, but must have been poor; for he depended for support on a trade which he learned in accordance with rabbinical custom; it was the trade of tent-making, very common in Cilicia, and not profitable except in large cities. — Philip Schaff

Freedom of religion is one of the greatest gifts of God to man, without distinction of race and color. He is the author and lord of conscience, and no power on earth has a right to stand between God and the conscience. — Philip Schaff

On the other hand, no man is saved mechanically or by force, but through faith, freely, by accepting the gift of God. This implies the contrary power of rejecting the gift. To accept is no merit, to reject is ingratitude and guilt. All Calvinistic preachers appeal to man's responsibility. They pray as if everything depended on God; and yet they preach and work as if everything depended on man. — Philip Schaff

It is a strange misunderstanding to make Paul either a fatalist or a particularist; he is the strongest opponent of blind necessity and of Jewish particularism, even in the ninth chapter of Romans. But he aims at no philosophical solution of a problem which the finite understanding of man cannot settle; he contents himself with asserting its divine and human aspects, the religious and ethical view, the absolute sovereignty of God and the relative freedom of man, the free gift of salvation and the just punishment for neglecting it. Christian experience includes both truths, and we find no contradiction in praying as if all depended on God, and in working as if all depended on man. This is Pauline theology and practice. — Philip Schaff

The style of the Bible in general is singularly adapted to men of every class and grade of culture, affording the child the simple nourishment for its religious wants, and the profoundest thinker inexhaustible matter of study. — Philip Schaff

The United States furnishes the first example in history of a government deliberately depriving itself of all legislative control of religion. — Philip Schaff

The Council of Nicaea. An ecumenical council was a new experiment. Local councils had long since grown to be a recognised organ of the Church both for legislation and for judicial proceedings. But no precedent as yet prescribed, no ecclesiastical law or theological principle had as yet enthroned, the 'General Council' as the supreme expression of the Church's mind. — Philip Schaff

The resurrection of Christ is therefore emphatically a test question upon which depends the truth or falsehood of the Christian religion. It is either the greatest miracle or the greatest delusion which history records. — Philip Schaff

The facts must rule philosophy, not philosophy the facts. — Philip Schaff

In our country we ask no toleration for religion and its free exercise, but we claim it as an inalienable right. — Philip Schaff

The history of mankind before his birth must be viewed as a preparation for his coming, and the history after his birth as a gradual diffusion of his spirit and progress of his kingdom. — Philip Schaff

This spirit of humanity breathes in Cicero and Virgil. Hence the veneration paid to the poet of the Aeneid by the fathers and throughout the middle ages. Augustine calls him the noblest of poets, and Dante, "the glory and light of other poets," and "his master," who guided him through the regions of hell and purgatory to the very gates of Paradise. It was believed that in his fourth Eclogue he had prophesied the advent of Christ. This interpretation is erroneous; but "there is in Virgil," says an accomplished scholar,84 "a vein of thought and sentiment more devout, more humane, more akin to the Christian than is to be found in any other ancient poet, whether Greek or Roman. He was a spirit prepared and waiting, though he knew it not, for some better thing to be revealed. — Philip Schaff

To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts; to the second, the Epistles; to the third, the Revelation. — Philip Schaff

Without His Resurrection the death of Christ would be of no avail, and His grave would be the grave of all our hopes. A gospel of a dead Savior would be a miserable failure and delusion. The Resurrection is the victory of righteousness and life over sin an death. — Philip Schaff

The Son of God, prompted by the same infinite love, laid aside his divine glory and mode of existence, emptied himself exchanged the form of God for the form of a servant, humbled himself and became obedient, even unto the death of the cross. — Philip Schaff