Inspirational Quotes by Richard Cecil
“You can't revisit a place where you were happy, as you can't re-love someone you've loved and left" ~from "Package Tour”
― Richard Cecil ,
“If there is any person to whom you feel a dislike, that is the person of whom you ought never to speak.”
“When a founder has cast a bell he does not presently fix it in the steeple, but tries it with his hammer, and beats it on every side to see if there be any flaw in it. So Christ doth not, presently after he has converted a man, convey him to heaven; but suffers him first to be beaten upon by many temptations, and then exalts him to his crown.”
topics: Suffering
“There are three things which the true Christian desires in respect to sin: Justification, that it may not condemn; sanctification, that it may not reign; and glorification, that it may not be.”
“Duties are ours, events are God's. This removes an infinite burden from the shoulders of a miserable, tempted, dying creature. On this consideration only can he securely lay down his head and close his eyes.”
“Supreme and abiding self-love is a very dwarfish affection, but a giant evil.”
“Self-will so ardent and active that it will break a world to pieces to make a stool to sit on.”
topics: Selfishness
“The meanness of the earthen vessel which conveys to others the Gospel of treasure, takes nothing from the value of the treasure. A dying hand may sign a deed of gift of incalculable value. A shepherd's boy may point out the way to a philosopher. A beggar may be the bearer of an invaluable present.”
topics: Scripture
“Recollection is the life of religion. The Christian wants to know no new thing, but to have his heart elevated more above the world by secluding himself from it as much as his duties will allow, that religion may effect its great end by bringing its sublime hopes and prospects into more steady action on the mind.”
topics: Religion
“The religion of a sinner stands on two pillars; namely, what Christ did for us in the flesh, and what he performs in us by his Spirit. Most errors arise from an attempt to separate these two.”
topics: Religion
“The joy of religion is an exorcist to the mind; it expels the demons of carnal mirth and madness.”
“Solitude shows us what we should be; society shows us what we are.”
topics: Reasoning
“We hear much of a decent pride, a becoming pride, a noble pride, a laudable pride. Can that be decent, of which we ought to be ashamed? Can that be becoming, of which God has set forth the deformity? Can that be noble which God resists and is determined to abase? Can that be laudable, which God calls abominable? Providence is a greater mystery than revelation. The state of the world is more humiliating to our reason than the doctrines of the Gospel. A reflecting Christian sees more to excite his astonishment, and to exercise his faith, in the state of things between Temple Bar and St. Paul's, than in what he reads from Genesis to Revelations.”
“To love to preach is one thing to love those to whom we preach, quite another.”
“It requires as much reflection and wisdom to know what is not to be put into a sermon, as what is.”
topics: Preaching
“The world looks at preachers out of church to know what they mean in it.”
topics: Preaching
“I could write down twenty cases wherein I wished that God had done otherwise than he did, but which I now see, if I had had my own way, would have led to extensive mischief.”
topics: Prayer
“The only instance of praying to saints, mentioned in the Bible, is that of the rich man in torment calling upon Abraham; and let it be remembered, that it was practised only by a lost soul and without success.”
“The Christian will find his parentheses for prayer even in the busiest hours of life.”
topics: Prayer
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Richard Cecil was a leading Evangelical Anglican clergyman of the 18th and 19th centuries. His father was an Anglican while his mother was a Dissenter, whose family had been devout Christians for generations.
He later became minister of two small livings in Lewes, Sussex. After the death of his parents, he moved, because of bad health, to Islington, London and preached at different churches and chapels there. For some years he preached a lecture at Lothbury at 6 o'clock on a Sabbath morning, and later an evening lecture in Orange Street, followed by the chapel in Long Acre. From 1787 he preached the evening lecture at Christ Church, Spitalfields.
In 1788 he became minister of St John's Chapel, Bedford Row, which became a major Evangelical Anglican venue continuing into the mid 19th century.