From John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Chapter VI, Section 1, (1559):
Just as old or bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God. This, therefore, is a special gift, where God, to instruct the church, not merely uses mute teachers but also opens his own most hallowed lips.
From Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline, at page 7:
We do not need to be hung on the horns of the dilemma of either human works or idleness. God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us. . . .
This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines – they are a way of sowing to the spirit. The Disciplines are God’s way of getting us into the ground; they put us where he can work within us and transform us. By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done. They are God’s means of grace. The inner righteousness we seek is not something that is poured on our heads. God has ordained the disciplines of the spiritual life as the means by which we place ourselves where he can bless us.”
From Mary Anne Foley, C.N.D., On Preaching, Listening and Praying," Living Pulpit, in July-September 1993, Volume 2, No. 3 at page 37:
To become silent so that we can truly listen with open hearts is, quite simply to pray. Thus the preacher’s real task is to invite herself and the congregation to pray, and to do so in a way that goes far deeper than the saying of prayers. There is a story about such a preacher, one of those stories which certainly ought to have happened even if it didn’t.
From Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr.,George Esper, The Eyewitness History of the Vietnam War 1961-75. (1983):
A man does a lot of prayer in an enemy prison. Prayer, even more than sheer thought, is the firmest anchor. RefMgr field[22]: 2″
From Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther (Peter Smith Publisher Inc - September 1962) at p.201
Rather dramatic evidence exits in Luther’s notes on these lectures for the fact that while he was working on the Psalms Luther came to formulate those insights later ascribed to his revelation in the tower, the date of which scholars have tied in vain to establish with certainty.
(1512?) As Luther was reviewing in his mind Romans 1:17, the last sentence suddenly assumed a clarity which pervaded his whole being and opened the door of paradise” to him: ‘For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The Just shall live by faith.’ The power of these words lay in a new perception of the space-time of life and eternity. Luther saw that God’s justice is not consigned to a future day of judgment based on our record on earth when He will have the ‘last word.’ Instead, this justice is in us, in the here and now; for, if we will only perceive it, God has given us faith to live by, and we can perceive it by understanding the Word which is Christ.
From Encyclopedia Brittanica, Egypt", v.18, 117:
Amenhotep III . . . was succeeded by his son Amenhotep IV (ruled 1353-36 BC), the most controversial of all the kings of Egypt . . . .The earliest monuments of Amenhotep IV, who in his fifth regnal year changed his name to Akhenaton (“the one useful to Aton”), are conventional in their iconography and style, but from the first he gave the sun god a didactic title naming Aton, the solar disk. This title was later written inside a pair of carouches, as a king’s name would be. The king declared his religious allegiance by unprecedented use of “high priest of the sun god” as one of his own titles. The term Aton had long been in use, but under Thumose IV the Aton had been referred to as a god, and under Amenhotep those references became more frequent. Thus, Akhenatod did not create a new god but rather singled out this aspect of the sun god from among others. He also carried further radical tendencies that had recently developed in solar religion, in which the sun god was freed from his traditional mythological context and presented as the sole beneficent provider for the entire world. The King’s own divinity was emphasized.” The Aton was said to be his father, of whom he alone had knowledge, and they shared the status of king and celebrated jubilees together. In his first five regnal years, Akhenaton built many temples to the Aton, of which the most important were in the precinct of the temple of Amon-Re at Karnak. In these open-air structures was developed a new, highly stylized form of relief and sculpture in the round. The Aton was depicted not in anthropomorphic form but as a solar disk from which radiating arms extend the hieroglyph for “life” to the noses of the king and his family. During the construction of these temples the cult of Amon and other gods was suspended, and the worship of the Aton in an open air sanctuary superseded that of Amon, who had dwelt in a dark shrine of the Karnak temple. The King’s wife Nefertiti, whom he had married before his succesion was prominent in the reliefs and had a complete shrine dedicated to her that included no images of the King. Her prestige continued to grow for much of the reign. RefMgr field[22]: 3″
From Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836):
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.”
From George Eliot, Middlemarch (Konemann UK Ltd - November 1997)
Dorothea herself had no dreams of being praised above other women, feeling that there was always something better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known. “Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa [of Avila] will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength,** spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unmarked tombs. [** Herodotus says that Cyrus of Persia punished the powerful Gyndes River — it had, after all, drowned his horse! — by having his army dig 180 canals from each bank, rendering the river ‘so weak that women should ever after cross it easily without wetting their knees.’]