Inspirational Quotes by Elizabeth Prentiss
“one must either stop reading the Bible altogether, or else leave off spending one's whole time in just doing easy pleasant things one likes to do.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“I want to see little children adorning every home, as flowers adorn every meadow and every way-side. I want to see them welcomed to the homes they enter, to see their parents grow less and less selfish and more and more loving, because they have come. I want to see God's precious gifts accepted, not frowned upon and refused.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“And as to carrying religion into everything, how can one help it if one's religion is a vital part of one's self, not a cloak put on to go to church in and hang up out of the way against next Sunday?”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God; and the body in which it dwells is worthy all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ’s name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother’s heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her lifelong prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“What grieves me is that I am constantly forgetting to recognize God’s hand in the little, everyday trials of life, and instead of receiving them as from Him, find fault with the instruments by which He sends them.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“but I have had some delightful thoughts of late from just hearing the title of a book, God’s Method with the Maladies of the Soul. It gives one such a conception of the seeming ills of life: to think of Him as our Physician, the ills all remedies, the deprivations only a wholesome regimen, the losses all gains. Why, as I study this individual case and that, see how patiently and persistently He tries now this remedy now that, and how infallibly He cures the souls that submit to His remedies, I love Him so! I love Him so! And I am so astonished that we are restive under His unerring hand! Think how He dealt with me. My soul was sick unto death, sick with worldliness and self-pleasing folly. There was only one way of making me listen to reason and that was just the way He took. He snatched me right out of the world and shut me up in one room, crippled, helpless, and alone, and set me to thinking, thinking, thinking till I saw the emptiness and shallowness of all in which I had hitherto been involved. And then He sent you and your mother to show me the reality of life and to reveal to me my invisible, unknown Physician. Can I love Him with half my heart? Can I be asking questions as to how much I am to pay toward the debt I owe Him?”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“Consenting to suffer does not annul the suffering.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“Perhaps suspense has been one of the most trying features of my case. Just as I have unclasped my hand from my dear Ernest's; just as I have let go my almost frantic hold of my darling children; just as heaven opened before me and I fancied my weariness over and my wanderings done; just then almost every alarming sympathy would disappear and life recall me from the threshold of heaven itself. Thus I have been emptied from vessel to vessel, till I have learned that he only is truly happy who has no longer a choice of his own and lies passive in God's hand. Even now, no one can foretell the issue of this sickness. We live a day at a time, not knowing what shall be on the morrow. But whether I live or die, my happiness is secure, and so, I believe, is that of my beloved ones.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“But there is no use in trying to engraft an opposite nature on one’s own. What I am, that I must be, except as God changes me into His own image. And everything brings me back to that, as my supreme desire. I see more and more that I must be myself what I want my children to be and that I cannot make myself over even for their sakes. This must be His work, and I wonder that it goes on so slowly, that all the disappointments, sorrows, sicknesses I have passed through have left me still selfish, still full of imperfections!”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“During my long illness and confinement to my room, the Bible has been almost a new book to me; and I see that God has always dealt with His children as He deals with them now and that no new thing has befallen me. All these weary days so full of languor, these nights so full of unrest have had their appointed mission to my soul. And perhaps I have had no discipline so salutary as this forced inaction and uselessness at a time when youth and natural energy continually cried out for room and work.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“A plan of life? ...Yet you would smile at an architect who, having a noble structure to build, should begin to work on it in a haphazard way, putting in a brick here and a stone there, weaving in straws and sticks if they come to hand, and when asked on what work he was engaged and what manner of building he intended to erect, should reply he had no plan but thought something would come of it.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“Let us look at the bright side of life and believe that God means us to be always ascending, always getting nearer to Himself, always learning something new about Him, always loving Him better and better... It gives one such a conception of the seeming ills of life: to think of Him as our Physician, the ills all remedies, the deprivations only a wholesome regimen, the losses all gains... see how patiently and persistently He tries now this remedy now that, and how infallibly He cures the souls that submit to His remedies, I love Him so! ...I am so astonished that we are restive under His unerring hand! Think how He dealt with me. My soul was sick unto death, sick with worldliness and self-pleasing folly. There was only one way of making me listen to reason and that was just the way He took. He snatched me right out of the world and shut me up in one room, crippled, helpless, and alone and set me to thinking, thinking, thinking till I saw the emptiness and shallowness of all in which I had hitherto been involved. And then He sent you and your mother to show me the reality of life and to reveal to me my invisible, unknown Physician. Can I love Him with half my heart?”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“And it gives me positive personal pain to see heirs of the eternal kingdom, made such by the ignominious death of their Lord, go shrinking and weeping to the full possession of their inheritance.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“Bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Take what I cannot give--my heart, body, thoughts, time, abilities, money, health, strength, nights, days, youth, age, and spend them in Thy service, O my crucified Master, Redeemer, God. Oh, let these not be mere words! Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee. My heart is athirst for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
topics: christian
“. There is no wilderness so dreary but that His love can illuminate it, no desolation so desolate but that He can sweeten it. I know what I am saying. It is no delusion. I believe that the highest, purest happiness is known only to those who have learned Christ in sick-rooms, in poverty, in racking suspense and anxiety, amid hardships, and at the open grave.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“...if I had been told what I was to learn through these protracted sufferings, I am afraid I should have shrunk back in terror and so have lost all the sweet lessons God proposed to teach me. As it is, He has led me on, step by step, answering my prayers in His own way; and I cannot bear to have a single human being doubt that it has been a perfect way. I love and adore it just as it is.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“I am afraid it is only too true, as some one has remarked, that "this is the age of obedient parents!"What then will be the future of their children? How can they yield to God who have never been taught to yield to human authority? And how well fitted will they be to rule their own households who have never learned to rule themselves?”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“We look at our fellow men too much from the standpoint of our own prejudices. They may be wrong, they may have their faults and foibles, they may call out all the meanest and most hateful in us. But they are not all wrong; they have their virtues, and when they excite our bad passions by their own, they may be as ashamed and sorry as we are irritated. And I think some of the best, most contrite, most useful of men and women, whose prayers prevail with God and bring down blessings into the homes in which they dwell, often possess unlovely traits that furnish them with their best discipline. The very fact that they are ashamed of themselves drives them to God; they feel safe in His presence. And while they lie in the very dust of self-confusion as His feet, they are dear to Him and have power with Him.”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Stepping Heavenward
“Home again, and full of the thousand cares that follow the summer and precede the winter. But let mothers and wives fret as they will, they enjoy these labours of love, and would feel lost without them. For what amount of leisure, ease, and comfort, would I exchange husband and children and this busy home?”
“But if God does not give us children, knowing as He does how thankful we should be for them, it is surely because He has some good reason for it. Perhaps there are now in the world some fatherless and motherless little ones that He is saving for us till we can afford to take them”
― Elizabeth Prentiss ,
from Aunt Jane's Hero
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Elizabeth Payson Prentiss was an author, well known for her hymn "More Love to Thee, O Christ" and the didactic story Stepping Heavenward (1869). She was born and raised in Portland, Maine, United States, the fifth of eight children (only six survived) of the eminent Congregationalist pastor Edward Payson. The influences of New England Christianity, consisting of the inherited Puritan foundation with added evangelistic, missional, and philanthropic elements, were evident in the Payson family.
As a young woman, she published some of her children's stories and poems in "The Youth's Companion," a New England religious periodical. In 1838, she opened a small girls' school in her home and took up a Sabbath-school class as well. Two years later, she left for Richmond, VA, to be a department head at a girls' boarding school. In 1845, she married George Lewis Prentiss, a brother of her dear friend Anna Prentiss Stearns, to whom are addressed some of her warmest and most intimate letters. The Prentisses settled in New Bedford, MA, where George became pastor of South Trinitarian Church.
Though she continually struggled with poor health, Mrs. Prentiss went on to have three children. After Rev. Prentiss resigned his charge in New York, the family went abroad to Europe for a couple of years, returned to New York (where Rev. Prentiss pastored the Church of the Covenant), and eventually settled in Dorset, VT, where Mrs. Prentiss would die in 1878 at the age of 60.