C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Mystery
Mystery hovers over all things here below.
Mystery and innocence are not akin.
There is a profound charm in mystery.
Mystery has great charms for womanhood.
The heavens are full of floating mysteries.
There is no religion without mystery. God Himself is the great secret of Nature.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil.
It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit.
All things unrevealed belong to the kingdom of mystery.
All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the dark veil.
Providence is a greater mystery than revelation.
Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.
A religion without its mysteries is a temple without a God.
God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.
That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.
A proper secrecy is the only mystery of able men; mystery is the only secrecy of weak and cunning ones.
The mysteries of Nature and of humanity are not lessened, but increased, by the discoveries of philosophic skill.
Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.
Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion.
Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun; the hand that warned Belshazzar derived its horrifying influence from the want of a body.
The mystery of the Bible should teach us, at one and the same time, our nothingness and our greatness; producing humility and animating hope.
For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snow-flake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last.
Whoever believes in a God at all, believes in an infinite mystery; and if the existence of God is such an infinite mystery, we can very well expect and afford to have many of His ways mysterious to us.
The nature of Christ is, I grant it, from one end to another, a web of mysteries; but this mysteriousness does not correspond to the difficulties which all existence contains. Let it be rejected, and the whole world is an enigma; let it be accepted, and we possess a wonderful explanation of the history of man.
Were there no mysteries in the Bible, we should doubt its being the transcript of the Eternal Mind. The “mystery of godliness” adapts it to our ruined race. Those mysteries of the Bible are like the mountains of the world; they give grandeur to the landscape and fertility to the soil.
Most men take least notice of what is plain, as if that was of no use; but puzzle their thoughts to be themselves in those vast depths and abysses which no human understanding can fathom.
The Bible tells me explicitly that Christ was God; and it tells me, as explicitly that Christ was man. It does not go on to state the modus or manner of the union. I stop, therefore, where the Bible stops. I bow before a God-man as my Mediator, but I own as inscrutable the mysteries of His person.
We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries; and it has been well said that a thing is not necessarily against reason because it happens to be above it.
To a man who is uncorrupt and properly constituted, woman always remains something of a mystery and a romance. He never interprets her quite literally. She, on her part, is always striving to remain a poem, and is never weary of bringing out new editions of herself in novel bindings.
Can anything be more mysterious than the union of soul and body, unless it be the still greater mystery, which some have professed to believe, that matter can be so organized as to produce the amazing intellectual results which we witness in man? In believing our own existence we believe a mystery as great as any that the Christian religion presents.
We live in the midst of infinite existence; and widely as we can see, and vastly as we have discovered, we have but crossed the threshold, we have but entered the vestibule of the Creator’s temple. In this temple there is an everlasting worship of life, an anthem of many choruses, a hymn of incense that goes up forever.