1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. John Campbell Shairp

John Campbell Shairp Quotes

John Campbell Shairp was a Scottish critic and man of letters.

He was born at Houstoun House, Linlithgowshire, the third son of Major Norman Shairp of Houstoun, and was educated at Edinburgh Academy and the University of Glasgow.

He gained a Shell exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford in 1840. In 1842 he won the Newdigate prize for a poem on Charles XII of Sweden, and took his degree in 1844. During these years the "Oxford Movement" was at its height. Shairp was stirred by Newman's sermons, and he had a great admiration for the poetry of John Keble, on whose character and work he wrote an enthusiastic essay; but he remained faithful to his Presbyterian upbringing. After leaving Oxford he took a mastership at Rugby School under Archibald Campbell Tait.

In 1857 he became assistant to the professor of humanity in the University of St Andrews, and in 1861 he was appointed to that chair. In 1864 he published Kilmahoe, a Highland Pastoral, and in 1868 he republished some articles under the name of Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. In 1868 he was presented to the principalship of the United College, St Andrews, and lectured from time to time on literary and ethical subjects. A course of the lectures was published in 1870 as Culture and Religion. In 1873 Principal Shairp helped to edit the life of his predecessor JD Forbes, and in 1874 he edited Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour in Scotland.

In 1877 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in succession to Sir F. H. Doyle. Of his lectures from this chair the best were published in 1881 as Aspects of Poetry. In 1877 he had published The Poetic Interpretation of Nature, in which he enters fully into the "old quarrel," as Plato called it, between science and poetry, and traces with great clearness the ideas of nature in all the chief Hebrew, classical and English poets. In 1879 he contributed a life of Robert Burns to the "English Men of Letters" series.

He was re-elected to the chair of poetry in 1882, and discharged his duties there and at St Andrews till the end of 1884.He was a friend and correspondent of the Scottish poet and composer, Mary Maxwell Campbell, who lived at St Andrews. He died at Ormsary, Argyllshire. In 1888 appeared Glen Desseray, and other Poems, edited by Francis Turner Palgrave.

See WA Knight's Principal Shairp and his Friends . Wikipedia  

✵ 30. July 1819 – 18. September 1885
John Campbell Shairp photo
John Campbell Shairp: 14   quotes 0   likes

Famous John Campbell Shairp Quotes

“The main condition is that the spiritual ear should be open to overhear and patiently take in, and the will ready to obey that testimony which, I believe, God bears in every human heart, however dull, to those great truths which the Bible reveals. This, and not logic, is the way to grow in religious knowledge, to know that the truths of religion are not shadows, but deep realities.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 37.

“For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 406.

“The ground of all religion, that which makes it possible, is the relation in which the human soul stands to God.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 493.

“The fact is those root-truths on which the foundations of our being rest, are apprehended not logically at all, but mystically. This faculty of spiritual apprehension, which is a very different one from those which are trained in schools and colleges, must be educated and fed, not less, but more carefully than our lower faculties, else it will be starved and die, however learned and able in other respects we may become.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 563.

“They who seek religion for culture's sake are aesthetic, not religious, and will never gain that grace which religion adds to culture, because they never can have the religion.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 503.

“There is perhaps no truer sign that a man is really advancing than that he is learning to forget himself, that he is losing the natural thoughts about self in the thought of One higher than himself, to whose guidance he can commit himself and all men.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 565.

John Campbell Shairp Quotes about men

“Not as men of science, not as critics, not as philosophers, but as little children, shall we enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 332.

“The belief in a Divine education, open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by culture, supplements, and perfects it.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 504.

“It is quite certain that, if from childhood men were to begin to follow the first intimations of conscience, honestly to obey them and carry them out into act, the power of conscience would be so strengthened and improved within them, that it would soon become, what it evidently is intended to be, "a connecting principle between the creature and the Creator."”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 156.

John Campbell Shairp Quotes

“Were it not well, then, to begin with the substance, to learn to apprehend the reality of that kingdom which is all around us now, whether we recognize it or not, — to take our aims and endeavors into it, that they may be made part of it, however small, — to surrender ourselves to it, that our lives may do something towards its advancement, and that we may become fellow-workers, however humble, with all the wise and good who have gone before us, and with Him who made them what they are?”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 269.

Reality , Learning , Parting

“Criticism is not religion, and by no process can it be substituted for it. It is not the critic's eye, but the child's heart, that most truly discerns the countenance that looks out from the pages of the gospel.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 168.

Religion , Heart

“The sense that a man is serving a Higher than himself, with a service which will become ever more and more perfect freedom, evokes more profound, more humbling, more exalted emotions than any thing else in the world can do. The spirit of man is an instrument which cannot give out its deepest, finest tones, except under the immediate hand of the Divine Harmonist.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 127.

World , Sense , Freedom , Perfection

“That image or rather that Person, so human, yet so entirely Divine, has a power to fill the imagination, to arrest the affections, to deepen and purify the conscience, which nothing else in the world has.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 61.

World , Imagination , Personality

“We are not called on to believe this or that doctrine which may be proposed to us till we can do so from honest conviction. But we are called on to trust, — to trust ourselves to God, being sure that He will lead us right, — to keep close to Him, — and to trust the promises which He whispers through our conscience; this we can do, and we ought to do.”

John Campbell Shairp

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 195.

God

Similar authors

Joseph Conrad photo
Joseph Conrad 127
Polish-British writer
Robert Southey photo
Robert Southey 51
British poet
Benjamin Disraeli photo
Benjamin Disraeli 306
British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Pri…
Charles Caleb Colton photo
Charles Caleb Colton 38
British priest and writer
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach photo
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 81
Austrian writer
Bettina von Arnim photo
Bettina von Arnim 1
German writer
Ludwig Börne photo
Ludwig Börne 1
German writer
Guy De Maupassant photo
Guy De Maupassant 59
French writer
Stendhal photo
Stendhal 50
French writer
Ivan Turgenev photo
Ivan Turgenev 7
Russian writer