Maltbie D Babcock Quotes & Sayings

The world is God's workshop; the raw materials are His; the ideals and patterns are His; our hands are "the members of Christ," our reward His recognition. Blacksmith or banker, draughtsman or doctor, painter or preacher, servant or statesman, must work as unto the Lord, not merely making a living, but devoting a life. This makes life sacramental, turning its water into wine. This is twice blessed, blessing both the worker and the work. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Pay little attention to discouragement as possible. Plough ahead as a steamer does, rough or smooth - rain or shine. To carry your cargo and make your port is the point. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Dare we let children grow up with no vital contact with the Saviour, never intentionally and consciously put into His arms? Not to bring them to Him, not to teach them to walk toward Him, as soon as they can walk toward anyone, is wronging a child beyond words. The terrible indictment uttered by the Lord, "Them that were entering in ye hindered," and the millstone warning for offending little ones, are close akin to the deserts of those who ruin a man's whole day of life by wronging his morning hours. Not to help a child to know the saving power of Christ is to hold back a man from salvation. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Be strong! It matters not how deep entrenched the wrong, how hard the battle goes, the day how long, faint not, fight on! Tomorrow comes the song. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Our prayers must mean something to us if they are to mean anything to God. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Loyalty to God is alone fundamental. Feelings, words, deeds, must be beads strung on the string of duty. Let the world tell you in a hundred ways what your life is for. Say you ever and only, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O my God." Out of that dutiful root grows the beautiful life, the life radically and radiantly true to God
the only life that can be lived in both worlds. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes satin. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

May death be no more than the bell that sounds when school is over, and going home, may I find that I had laid up my treasure in the right place. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Although there is nothing so bad for conscience as trifling, there is nothing so good for conscience as trifles. Its certain discipline and development are related to the smallest things. Conscience, like gravitation, takes hold of atoms. Nothing is morally indifferent. Conscience must reign in manners as well as morals, in amusements as well as work. He only who is "faithful in that which is least" is dependable in all the world. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Is not this steadfastness to mark, to make, the character of your lives? Is it not God's will that we should press steadily on to our goal in obedience to Him, in channels of His choosing, whether in sunshine or shadow, in the cheer of spring or in the chill of winter, neither detained by pleasure nor deterred by pain? — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

You are not responsible for the disposition you are born with, but you are responsible for the one you die with. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

What is our hope but the indwelling Spirit of Christ, to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, to inspire every word and deed by His love? Then will "broken lights" blend in steady shining, the fractional be summed up in the integral, and life, unified and beautified by the central Christ, radiate God's glory, and shine with divine effulgence. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

To have failed is to have striven, to have striven is to have grown. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Worship demands the far distances of God; it protests against the little, the near, the material. It must love but it must look up. It cannot live without the note of spirituality and universality, if not mystery. The ascension, the passing of Christ within the veil, answers this need. So does a full-robed Christianity add to definiteness of knowledge the outreach of imagination and home. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The tests of life are to make, not break us. Trouble may demolish a man's business but build up his character. The blow at the outward man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man. If God, then, puts or permits anything hard in our lives, be sure that the real peril, the real trouble, is that we shall lose if we flinch or rebel. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Jesus does not want us to say, dead, for, He said, all live unto Him, though they seem dead to us. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

I agree with you that the communion with the invisible saints must be more of a dream than a reality. But we have a right to dream dreams, if they are not contradicted by the evident laws of God's word, or God's world. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Better to lose count while naming your blessings than to lose your blessings to counting your troubles. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The Christian life that is joyless is a discredit to God and a disgrace to itself. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Be strong! We are not here to play, to dream, to drift; We have hard work to do and loads to lift; Shun not the struggle-face it; 'tis God's gift. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

If you can help anybody even a little, be glad. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the new year. The workshop of character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is lost or won. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Many a good intention dies from inattention. If, through carelessness or indolence, or selfishness, a good intention is not put into effect, we have lost an opportunity, demoralized ourselves, and stolen from the pile of possible good. To be born and not fed, is to perish. To launch a ship and neglect it is to lose it. To have a talent and bury it, is to be a "wicked and slothful servant." For in the end we shall be judged, not alone by what we have done, but by what we could have done. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

It is the "where I am" that makes heaven. The life after death might become through its very endlessness a burden to our spirits, if it were not to be filled with the infinite variety and freshness of God's love. Some have shrunk from its very infinitude, because they have not realized what God's love can make of it. Human love helps us to understand this. When we have come to love any one with all our power of affection, then there is no monotony or weariness in the days and hours we spend with them. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The root of honesty is an honest intention, the distinct and deliberate purpose to be true, to handle facts as they are, and not as we wish them to be. Facts lend themselves to manipulation. Many a butcher's hand is worth more than its weight in gold. What we want things to be, we come to see them to be; and the tailor pulls the coat and the truth into a perfect fit from his point of view. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

A day dawns, quite like other days; in it, a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Life is what we are alive to. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The only test of possession is use. The talent that is buried is not owned. The napkin and the hole in the ground are far more truly the man's property, because they are accomplishing something for him, slothful and shameful though it be. And what is a lost soul? Is it not one that God cannot use, or one that cannot use God? Trustless, prayerless, fruitless, loveless
is it not so far lost? So may a man have a soul that is lost and be dead while he lives. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Remember to think of your departed mother always as living, just away in another room of our Father's house. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock