A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
A Church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.
A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery.
A glorious Church is like a magnificent feast; there is all the variety that may be, but every one chooses out a dish or two that he likes, and lets the rest alone: how glorious soever the Church is, every one chooses out of it his own religion, by which he governs himself, and lets the rest alone.
A group touring Westminster Abbey in London heard the guide list the famous people buried within its walls. During a momentary silence a little old lady's voice blurted out loud and clear, ''Anybody been saved here lately?''
A little, round, fat, oily man of God.
A woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.
An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.
And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.
Archbishop — A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.
But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed — a compass, not a weathercock.
Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.
Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.
Churchgoers are like coals in a fire. When they cling together, they keep the flame aglow; when they separate, they die out.
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
He who is near the Church is often far from God.
Here, the churches seemed to shrink away into eroding corners. They seem to have ceased to be essential parts of American life. They no longer give life. It is the huge buildings of commerce and trade which now align the people to attention. These in their massive manner of steel and stone say, Come unto me all ye who labor, and we will give you work.
His creed no parson ever knew, for this was still his ''simple plan,'' to have with clergymen to do as little as a Christian can.