“One of the first evidences of man's sinfulness and misery by it, was that he could not endure, but hid himself from the voice and face of God”

— Ralph Venning

Genesis 3:8
The Sinfulness of Sin

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Ralph Venning8

English minister 1621–1673

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“The psycho-analyst infers the monstrous and abnormal from a trifle; it is often safe to reverse the process. If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress.”

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“God's forgiveness is unconditional. There is no condition whatsoever in man which would make him worthy of forgiveness. If forgiveness were conditional, conditioned by man, no one could be accepted and no one could accept himself. We know that this is our situation, but we loathe to face it.”

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“For me the voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or ‘the still small Voice’ mean one and the same thing. I saw no form. I have never tried, for I have always believed God to be without form. One who realizes God is freed from sin for ever…. But what I did hear was like a Voice from afar and yet quite near. It was as unmistakable as some human voice definitely speaking to me, and irresistible. I was not dreaming at the time I heard the Voice. The hearing of the Voice was preceded by a terrific struggle within me. Suddenly the Voice came upon me. I listened, made certain that it was the Voice, and the struggle ceased. I was calm. The determination was made accordingly, the date and the hour of the fast were fixed…. Could I give any further evidence that it was truly the Voice that I heard and that it was not an echo of my own heated imagination? I have no further evidence to convince the sceptic. He is free to say that it was all self-delusion or hallucination. It may well have been so. I can offer no proof to the contrary. But I can say this — that not the unanimous verdict of the whole world against me could shake me from the belief that what I heard was the true voice of God.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

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“It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man’s fate is not important.
“If it is not, what is?”
He could not endure those remembered words.”

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“Let's face it, man is destroying himself. He's killing himself with his pollution and with his destructive nature, and if God doesn't intervene and stop it, man would eventually wipe himself off the map!”

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“Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.”

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“Verily wondered what the man could have the audacity to say, in the face of such evidence—what whining, sniveling complaint or protest he might utter.”

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“Such too was Moses, who rose up in great wrath to oppose those who sinned against God, but endured with meekness of spirit all slanders against himself.”

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“Strange as it sounds, although Man thought himself hardly treated in respect to freedom, yet, if freedom meant superiority, Man was in action much the superior of God, whose freedom suffered, from Saint Thomas, under restraints that Man never would have tolerated. Saint Thomas did not allow God even an undetermined will; he was pure Act, and as such he could not change. Man alone was, in act, allowed to change direction. What was more curious still, Man might absolutely prove his freedom by refusing to move at all; if he did not like his life, he could stop it, and habitually did so, or acquiesced in its being done for him; while God could not commit suicide or even cease for a single instant his continuous action. If Man had the singular fancy of making himself absurd,— a taste confined to himself but attested by evidence exceedingly strong,— he could be as absurd as he liked; but God could not be absurd. Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity the right to contradict himself, which is one of Man's chief pleasures. While Man enjoyed what was, for his purposes, an unlimited freedom to be wicked,— a privilege which, as both Church and State bitterlly complained and still complain, he has outrageously abused,— God was Goodness and could be nothing else. […] In one respect, at least, Man's freedom seemed to be not relative but absolute, for his thought was an energy paying no regard to space or time or order or object or sense; but God's thought was his act and will at once; speaking correctly, God could not think, he is. Saint Thomas would not, or could not, admit that God was Necessity, as Abélard seems to have held, but he refused to tolerate the idea of a divine maniac, free from moral obligation to himself. The atmosphere of Saint Louis surrounds the God of Saint Thomas, and its pure ether shuts out the corruption and pollution to come,— the Valois and Bourbons, the Occams and Hobbes's, the Tudors and the Medicis of an enlightened Europe.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

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“Darkness is strong, and so is Sin,
But surely God endures forever.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Villa Franca.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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