Charles Spurgeon

"He is so fair, that nothing else is beautiful to any eye that has once gazed upon Him, and yet they spit in His face and mar His lovely countenance with cruel blows of fatal fists! He is all tenderness, but they are all cruelty! He is harmless as a lamb, He never thought nor spoke a thing of wrong to mortal man, but yet they strike Him as though He were a fierce beast of prey, fit only to be bruised to death. He is all love, and, when they smite Him worst, He doth but pray for them, yet smite they still! No curses drop from those dear lips, but words of pity only, and of sweet intercession, follow each blow, yet still they wound and buffet, and blaspheme! Oh, grief, far deeper than the sea! Oh, woe immeasurable! They smite Him for whom they ought to have gladly died, Him for whom the noble army of martyrs counted it all joy to render up their lives. They-despitefully entreat Him who came on errands of pure mercy and disinterested grace. Oh, cruel whips and cruel hands, and yet more cruel hearts, of wicked men!"

"Men have tried to overcome their passions by the contemplation of death, but they have failed to bury sin in the grave; they have striven to subdue the rage of lust within their nature by meditating upon hell, but that has only rendered the heart hard and callous to love's appeals. He who once believingly beholds the mystery of Christ suffering for him, shakes off the viper of sin into the fire which consumed the great sacrifice. "

"The Cross! The Cross! The Cross of Christ! What power dwells in it! Full sure if even for Satan that Cross had been set up on earth, it would have lifted him from hell to heaven! But it is not for him; it is, however, for the vilest of the sons of men; and there are no sons of men so corrupt that the Cross of Christ can not purge them of all evil."

"Do not tell me that we ought mainly to preach Christ exalted. I will preach my Lord upon the throne and delight therein, but the great remedy for ruined manhood is not Christ in glory, but Christ ill shame and death."

"I see now in vision a company of men gathering herbs along the slopes of the Seven Hills of Rome; with mystic rites they cull those ancient plants, whose noxious influence once drugged our fathers into deadly slumbers. They are compounding again the cup of Rome's ancient sorcery, and saying: "Here is the universal medicine! The great catholic remedy." I see them pouring their Belladonna, Monkshood, and deadly Henbane, into the great pot forever simmering on the Papal hearth. Think you the nations are to be healed by this accursed amalgam? Will not the end be as in the days of the prophets, when one gathered wild gourds, and they cried out, "there is death in the pot?" Ay, indeed, so it will he, even though Oxford and Canterbury set their seal upon the patent medicine. Come, ye brave sons of protesting fathers! Come and overturn this witches' caldron, and spill it back into the hell for which alone it is fit."

"if we had a thousand men who would preach nothing but Christ and live nothing but Christ, what would the world see? A thousand? Nay, give us but a dozen men on fire with the love of Jesus, and if they would preach Christ out and out and through and through, and nothing else, the world would know a change before long We should hear again the cry, "The men that turn: the world upside down have come hither also.""

"You can scarcely meet with a man who does not call himself a Christian, and yet it is equally hard to meet with one who is in the very marrow of his bones thoroughly sanctified to the good work of the kingdom of heaven. We meet with professors by hundreds; but me must expect still to meet with possessors by units. The whole nation appears to have been Christianized in an hour. But is this real? Is this sincere? Ah! we fear not. How is it that professors can live like other men? How is it that there is so little distinction between the church and the world?"

"Ah! we have abundance of cold, calculating Christians, multitudes of professors; but where are the zealous ones? where are the leaders of the children of God? where are your heroes who stand in the day of battle? where are your men who "count not their lives dear unto them," that they might win Christ, and be found in him? where are those who have an impassioned love for souls? How many of our pulpits are filled by earnest, enthusiastic preachers? Alas! look, at the church. She has builded herself fine palaces, imitating popery; she hath girded herself with vestments; she has gone astray from her simplicity; but she has lost the fire and the life which she once had."

"The salt of the earth are now the offscouring of all things; men whom God has loved, and who have attained a high standing in godliness these are the men who will not bow the knee to Baal, and who therefore are cast into the fiery furnace of persecution and slander."

"Look at the church of England. Her articles are pure and right in most respects; yet see how her garments are defiled. She hath made the Queen her Head instead of God; she bows before the state, and worships the golden calf that is set up before her."

"Ask them whether they can spend an hour in meditation upon Christ,"

"I beseech you, examine and cross-examine your own souls, and see whether ye be in the path, for it will go ill with you if ye shall find at last that ye were in the church, but not of it, that ye make a profession of religion, but it was only a cloak for your hypocrisy if ye should have entered into his courts below, and be shut out of the courts above."`