“Ye shall know the truth,” the Lord says, “and the truth shall make you free. I am the truth, and you shall be free as I am free. To be free, you must be sons like me. To be free, you must be that which you have to be, that which you are created to be... 

Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust. He died that we might live—but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself that he might live unto God.

The slavish man regards his own dominion over himself as a freedom infinitely greater than the range of the universe of God’s being. If he says, “At least I have it my own way!” I answer, you do not know what is your way and what is not. You know nothing of whence your impulses, your desires come...

One may call out, in the agony and thirst of a child waking from a dream of endless seeking and no finding, “I am bound like Lazarus in his grave-clothes! What am I to do?” Here is the answer...

There is, in truth, no midway between absolute harmony with the Father and the condition of slaves...

The slaves of sin rarely grumble at that slavery; it is their slavery to God they grumble at; of that alone they complain—of the painful messengers he sends to deliver them from their slavery both to sin and to himself. They must be sons or slaves... 

Nothing I have seen or known of sonship comes near the glory of the thing; but there are thousands of sons and daughters who are siding with the father of their spirits against themselves, against all that divides them from him from whom they have come, but out of whom they have never come, seeing that in him they live and move and have their being...

God indeed does not love slavery; he hates it; he will have children, not slaves; but he may keep a slave in his house a long time in the hope of waking up the poor slavish nature to aspire to the sonship which belongs to him, which is his birthright. But the slave is not to be in the house forever. The father is not bound to keep his son a slave because the foolish child prefers it... 

No amount of slavery to sin can keep a man from being as much the slave of God as God chooses in his mercy to make him. It is his sin makes him a slave instead of a child. His slavery to sin is his ruin; his slavery to God is his only hope.

The Lord gives us the will wherewith to will, and the power to use it, and the help needed to supplement the power; but we ourselves must will the truth, and for that he is waiting, for the victory of God his father in the heart of his child...

. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him...

Not any abstract truth, not truth its very metaphysical self, can make any man free; but the truth done, the truth loved, the truth lived by the man...

The highest truth to the intellect is the relation in which man stands to the source of his being—his love to the love that kindled his power to love, his intellect to the intellect that lighted his. If a man deal with these things only as ideas to be analyzed, he treats them as facts and not as truths, and is no better—probably much the worse—for his converse with them, for he is false to all that is most worthy of his faithfulness... 

Suppose a man did everything required of him, fulfilled all the duties of his relations with this fellows—was toward them at least, a true man; he would yet feel that something was lacking to his necessary well-being. Like a live flower, he would feel that he had not yet blossomed, and could not tell what the blossom ought to be. In this direction the words of the Lord point, when he says to the youth, “If thou wouldst be perfect..."

The man who recognizes the truth of any human relation, and neglects the duty involved, is not a true man. The man who takes good care of himself, and none of his brother and sister, is false. A man may be a poet, aware of the highest truth of a thing, he may be a man who would not tell a lie, or steal, or slander—and yet he may not be a true man...

The truth of a thing is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing; and wherever, in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky or flower or human face, we see the glory of God, there a true imagination is beholding a truth of God...

What is the truth of water? Is it that it is formed of hydrogen and oxygen? Is oxygen and hydrogen the divine idea of water? Or has God put the two together only that man might separate and find them out? He allows his child to pull his toys to pieces; but he were a child not to be envied for whom his inglorious father would make toys to such an end...

If we understand, if we love the flower, we have that for which the science is there, that which alone can equip us for true search into the means and ways by which the divine idea of the flower was wrought out to be presented to us. The idea of God is the flower; his idea is not the botany of the flower. 

Ask a man of mere science, what is the truth of a flower: he will pull it to pieces, show you its parts, explain how they operate, how they minister each to the life of the flower; he will tell you what changes are wrought in it by scientific cultivation; and many more facts about it. Ask the poet what is the truth of the flower, and he will answer: “Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help saying to him who has ears to hear it...” 

Every fact in nature is a revelation of God, is there such as it is because God is such as he is; and I suspect that all its facts impress us so that we learn God unconsciously...