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Austin Phelps

Austin Phelps


Austin Phelps, American Congregational minister and educationalist, was born at West Brookfield, Massachusetts.

He studied theology at Union Theological Seminary, at the Yale Divinity School, and later at Andover. Circa 1840, he was licensed to preach by the Third Presbytery of Philadelphia. During the Autumn of 1842, he married Elizabeth Phelps (nee Stuart, August 13, 1815 - December, 1852). Around the time he got married, he was pastor of the Pine Street (Congregational) Church in Boston. In the Spring of 1848 his family moved to Andover and from then till 1879 was professor of sacred rhetoric and homiletics at Andover Theological Seminary. Later to become president from 1869 to 1879, when his failing health forced him to resign.
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Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
topics: books  
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Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
topics: books , reading  
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We never feel Christ to be a reality, until we feel Him to be a necessity.
topics: christ  
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Possibly our hearts are shockingly deceitful in such iniquity. Are we strangers to an experience like this — that when we mourn over our cold prayers as a misfortune, we evade a search of that disputed territory for the cause of them, through fear that we shall find it there, and we struggle to satisfy ourselves with an increase of spiritual duties which shall cost us no sacrifice?
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Christianity is the only system of faith which combines religious beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. It builds ethics on religion.
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Through its whole history the Christian religion has developed supreme affinities for best things.
topics: Christianity  
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A disciplined conscience is a man's best friend. It may not be his most amiable, but it is his most faithful monitor.
topics: Conscience  
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The tendency of Christian ideas is to mental growth. The mind must expand that takes them in with cordial sympathy. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus wrought in him an intellectual as well as a moral revolution.
topics: Growth  
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In the destiny of every moral being there is an object more worthy of God than happiness. It is character. And the grand aim of man's creation is the development of a grand character, and grand character is, by its very nature, the product of probationary discipline.
topics: Happiness  
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It has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We may lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often long alone with God.
topics: Holiness , Prayer  
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We are never more like Christ than in prayers of intercession.
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Prayer is the preface to the book of Christian living; the text of the new life sermon; the girding on of the armor for battle; the pilgrim's preparation for his journey. It must be supplemented by action or it amounts to nothing.
topics: Prayer  
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Are you living for the things you are praying for?
topics: Prayer  
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Genius is not essential to good preaching, but a live man is.
topics: Preaching  
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The most intelligent hearers are those who enjoy most heartily the simplest preaching. It is not they who clamor for superlatively intellectual or aesthetic sermons. Daniel Webster used to complain of some of the preaching to which he listened. "In the house of God" he wanted to meditate "upon the simple varieties, and the undoubted facts of religion;" not upon mysteries and abstractions.
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Vigilance in watching opportunity; tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity; force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost of possible achievement -- these are the martial virtues which must command success.
topics: Virtue , Success  
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The consciousness of Divine friendship in devotion, so far from being impaired, is deepened by holy veneration. The purest and most lasting human friendships are permeated with an element of reverence; much more this friendship of a man with God.
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The feeling which will become spontaneous with a Christian, under the influence of such a trust, is this: ‘I come to my devotions this morning, on an errand of real life. This is no romance and no farce. I do not come here to go through a form of words. I have no hopeless desires to express. I have an object to gain. I have an end to accomplish. This is a business in which I am about to engage.
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If we suffer our faith to drop down from the lofty conception of prayer as having a lodgment in the very counsels of God, by which the universe is swayed, the plain practicalness of prayer as the Scriptures teach it, and as prophets and apostles and our Lord himself performed it, drops proportionately; and in that proportion, our motive to prayer dwindles.
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