“His life was like an open stream which keeps the sea from flowing up into it by the eager force with which it flows down into the sea. He was so anxious that the world should be saved that therein was His salvation from the world. He labored so to make the world pure that He never even had to try to be pure Himself.”
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 108.
Context: There are two ways of defending a castle; one by shutting yourself up in it, and guarding every loop-hole; the other by making it an open centre of operations from which all the surrounding country may be subdued. Is not the last the truest safety? Jesus was never guarding Himself, but always invading the lives of others with His holiness. There never was such an open life as His; and yet the force with which His character and love flowed out upon the world kept back, more strongly than any granite wall of prudent caution could have done, the world from pressing in on Him. His life was like an open stream which keeps the sea from flowing up into it by the eager force with which it flows down into the sea. He was so anxious that the world should be saved that therein was His salvation from the world. He labored so to make the world pure that He never even had to try to be pure Himself.
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Phillips Brooks 16
American clergyman and author 1835–1893Related quotes

“God is a flowing and ebbing sea which ceaselessly flows out into all his beloved”
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Context: God is a flowing and ebbing sea which ceaselessly flows out into all his beloved according to their needs and merits and which flows back with all those upon whom he has bestowed his gifts in heaven and on earth, together with all they possess or are capable of.

16 September 1902
Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 14
“So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.”
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Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

The Creation, st. 6.
God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927)

10 June 2014 comments to National Association of Manufacturers, reported later that day https://thehill.com/regulation/business/208857-biden-hails-constant-unrelenting-stream-of-immigrants by Benjamin Goad of The Hill
2010s, 2014

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 311.
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