Robert Lewis Dabney > Quotes

“It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This [Northern conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney

“A truth is not necessary, because we negatively are not able to conceive the actual existence of the opposite thereof;but a truth is necessary when we positively are able to apprehend that the negation thereof includes an inevitable contradiction. It is not that that we can see how the opposite comes to be true, but it is that the opposite can not possibly be true.”
― R.L. Dabney

“The moral judgments and acts of the soul all involve an exercise of reason, so that it is impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney

“He that is not with his God is against Him...Hence, as there cannot be in any soul a non-Christian state which is not anti-Christian, it follows that any training which attempts to be non-Christian is therefore anti-Christian.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney

“When the friends of the Bible win a victory over one phase of infidelity, they naturally hope that there will be a truce in the warfare and they may enjoy peace. But the hope is ill-founded. We should have foreseen this, had we considered the real source of infidelity is always in the pride, self-will and ungodliness of man's nature. So that, when men are defeated on one line of attack, a part of them at least will be certainly prompted by their natural enmity to God's Word to hunt for some new weapon against it.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney

“...the Creator has made man, in spite of himself, a logical animal; and consequences will work themselves out, whether he designs it or not, to those results which the premisses dictate.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney

“The preacher’s business is to take what is given him in the Scriptures, as it is given to him, and to endeavour to imprint it on the souls of men. All else is God’s work.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness as it converges on God, just as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion is excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, On Secular Education

“The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth.”
― R.L. Dabney

“An insuperable difference of race, made by God and not by man, and of character and social condition, makes it plainly impossible for a black man to teach and rule white Christians to edification.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions - Vol 2: Evangelical

“The public prayers of the pastor are apt to be the models of the devotions of his people; when he leads them in prayer he is really teaching them to pray. Prayer is the Christian’s vital breath. Prayer is the appointed channel of his whole redemption. How mischievous is that man who by his coldness, inappropriateness, irreverence, vagueness, unbelief, chills the aspirations and obstructs the access of a whole multitude which he should have led up to the mercy-seat!”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“In the last place: We observe some sincere Christians, whose minds are so swayed by the assertion that personal faith must be the invariable pre-requisite to baptism and admission to the church, that they seem incapable of ever entertaining the thought that the church membership of the children of believers may be reasonable and scriptural. The doctrine seems to them so great an anomaly that they cannot look dispassionately at the evidence for it. But to one who has weighed the truths set forth above, the absence of that doctrine from God’s dispensations would seem the strange anomaly. To him who has appreciated the parental relation as God represents it, the failure to include it within the circuit of the visible church, to sanctify its obligations and to seal its hopes with the sacramental badge, would appear the unaccountable thing.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Dabney On Fire: A Theology of Parenting, Education, Feminism, and Government

“Is it by the instrumentality of faith we receive Christ as our justification, without the merit of any of our works? Well. But this same faith, if vital enough to embrace Christ is also vital enough to "work by love," "to purify or hearts." This then is the virtue of the free gospel, as a ministry of sanctification, that the very faith which embraces the gift becomes an inevitable and a divinely powerful principle of obedience.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney

“But I would urge that the expository method (understood as that which explains extended passages of Scripture in course) be restored to that equal place which it held in the primitive and Reformed Churches; for, first, this is obviously the only natural and efficient way to do that which is the sole legitimate end of preaching, convey the whole message of God to the people.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“Every hope of the existence of church and of state, and of civilization itself, hangs upon our arduous effort to defeat the doctrine of negro suffrage.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions - Vol 2: Evangelical

“The appropriate mission of the minister is to preach the gospel for the salvation of souls. The servant who by diverging into some other project not especially enjoined on him, nor essential for him to perform, precludes himself from his allotted task, is clearly guilty of disobedience to his master, if not of treason to his charge.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“If, for instance, a Presbyterian pastor begins: “Methodists teach that a true believer may totally and finally fall away from a state of grace: this I shall now refute,” every person of that persuasion in the house will naturally feel as though he were personally assailed. But had this pastor advanced the opposite doctrine, so explained as to free it from odious misconceptions, in a didactic mode and temper, making only a respectful general reference to an honest difference of judgment upon it among the recognized followers of Christ, every fair-minded adherent of Wesley would have listened without offence, and would have come away with the pleasing impression that Christians were not so far asunder upon this vexed question as he had supposed. It is very much due to the observance of this simple rule that wise pastors (without infidelity to truth) preserve pleasant relations with other communions, hold their own ground triumphantly against encroachments, and even win accessions, without awakening denominational strife And it is usually the rash contempt of this easy caution which plunges others into unseemly and mischievous rivalries.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“But God’s topics, the fall, the curse, sin, death, immortality, duty, redemption, faith, hope, judgment, hell, heaven, these transcendent subjects have an abiding, an overmastering common interest All men share it, because they are men. These assert their power over the human soul under every condition, and in spite of man’s natural carnality, with a force akin to their vastness. Honour God then, my young brethren, by urging no other truths than those he has given you, urging them with disinterested fidelity, and he will honour your ministry.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“Now, for the preacher, the chief of these secondary sources is the testimony of the sacred Scriptures. Their authority as our rule of faith is inferred immediately from their inspired character; for if God is perfect truth, as must be assumed, or else all search for truth anywhere is preposterous; and if the Bible is God’s word, then it is infallible, and of course authoritative over the soul. But is the inspiration of the Bible self-evident to its readers? I answer, it is not immediately self-evident – that is to say, the proposition, “The Bible is inspired,” is not axiomatic – but it is readily found to be true upon bringing the internal and external evidences of it under the light of our self-consciousness, our mental and our moral intuitions. This is but saying that God, in revealing himself to man, has clothed his revelation with an amount of reasonable and moral evidence adapted to the creature’s nature, and sufficient, when inspected, to produce a perfect conviction. Thereupon the word of God assumes its place as of plenary authority over the soul in the department of which it professes to teach, that of our religious beliefs, duties, and redemption.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“Now, questions of politics must ever divide the minds of men; for they are not decided by any recognized standards of truth, but by the competitions of interest and passion. Hence, it is inevitable that he who embarks publicly in the discussion of these questions, must become the object of party animosities and obnoxious to those whom he opposes. How then can he successfully approach them as the messenger of redemption? By thus transcending his proper functions, he criminally prejudices his appointed work with half the community, for the whole of which he should affectionately labour.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“a strict integrity of mind should guide you in the selection and use of a passage of the Scriptures as a text. Never venture to expound it to the people, unless you are sure that you have the meaning intended by the Spirit, and offer to them no other than that.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“Here it is claimed is the fatal defect of all monistic schemes: they disclose hopeless contradiction of our necessary laws of thought and truths of experience, as their inevitable corollaries. Thus Spinoza, having assumed that all real existence must be absolute, existence and therefore one is obliged to teach that modes of extension and modes of thought can both qualify and at the same time be the law; and thus, that phenomenal beings as real and true to our experience as any a priori cognition, or as this very law itself, are both modes of the One, although a part of them are qualified by size, figure, ponderosity, impenetrability, color; and the other part universally and utterly lack every one of these qualities, and are qualified by thought, sensibility, desire, spontaneity, and self-action. But this is not a mystery, it is a self-contradiction. The qualities of matter and extension cannot be relevant to spirit, nor those of thought, feeling, and volition to matter. They utterly exclude each other. Descartes was right: the common sense of mankind is right in thus judging. The proof is that just so soon as we attempt to ascribe intelligence and will to matter, or qualities of extension to spirit, utterly absurd and impossible fancies are asserted. Spinoza teaches us that the Absolute Being must inevitably have an immutable sameness and necessity of being so strict, as to necessitate its absolute unity. Yet he has to teach, in order to carry out this monism, that this monad exists, at the same instant of time, not only in numberless diversities of mode, but in utterly opposite modes, as for instance, as solid, liquid, and gaseous at the same instant...Or, worse yet, that this One so necessary, eternal and absolute in its unity, may at the same moment of time, hate a Frenchman and love a Frenchman in the two modal manifestations of German and Gaul, and may hate sin and love the same sin in the two manifestations, at the same moment, of good souls and bad souls! Yet this Spinoza could not admit that infinite, eternal power and wisdom can make a beginning of real being objective to itself. Truly, this is 'straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions: Secular

“The Christianity of the region was not influential; ministers were few, and deficient in intelligence and weight, being chiefly the most uncultivated members of the Baptist communion, or of the itinerant fraternity of the Methodists. If the citizens saw anything of Episcopacy or Presbyterianism, it was only from the transient visits and sermons of ministers from a distance. The state of religious opinion was just what the observing man would expect from such influences. The profession of Christianity was chiefly confined to the more ignorant classes; and among them Church discipline and Christian morals were relaxed. Men of the ruling houses, like the Jacksons, were too often found to be corrupted by the power and wealth, with which the teeming fertility of their new country was rewarding their talents. Minds such as theirs, self-educated by the activity and competition of their bustling times, were too vigorous to acknowledge the intellectual sway of a class of ministers who dispensed for sermons their crude notions of experimental piety in barbarous English. There were few cultivated minds to represent the authority of the gospel. Consequently, most of the men of position were openly neglectful of Christianity, and some were infidels.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, LIFE AND CAMPAIGNS OF STONEWALL JACKSON, Annotated.

“He is not the true preacher who sends his hearers home exclaiming, “How eloquent the minister to-day; how beautiful his imagery; how artful his arrangement; how skilful his argument and his persuasion!” But he is the true sacred orator, who dismisses them so possessed and overpowered by God, that they have forgotten the creature who was the channel of the truth. The message should hide the messenger.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“Thus, if the low grade of intelligence, virtue, and civilization of the African in America, disqualified him for being his own guardian, and if his own true welfare, and that of the community, would be plainly marred by this freedom; then the law decided correctly that the African here has no natural right to his self-control, as to his own labour and locomotion.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Systematic Theology

“In favor of monism there is left, then, only the craving for excessive simplification, and the repugnance to the mystery of the origin of contingent beings. Against it stand the fatal contradictions to necessary intuitions and real facts of experience. Monism asks: How does even an infinite age produce an actual beginning of real beings ex nihilo? Sound philosophy must answer: It does not know; it cannot explain that action to human comprehension. But sound philosophy can show that this is no objection, because it can be proved that such explanation lies beyond the conditions of human knowledge. Those conditions understood, we see that we had no right to expect to be able to comprehend the beginning ex nihilo of contingent beings, nor to be stumbled at the fact...We say to the monist, then: Pause; both of you and we are out of our depth; we are in a region of ontology where we can safely neither affirm, nor deny, nor comprehend, nor explain. Let us lay our hands upon our mouths. The conclusion of that matter is to confess with the apostle (Hebrews xi. 3), that the doctrine of the begging of contingent being is one of faith, not of philosophy...And here is strong evidence of his acquaintance with the whole range of speculative human thought. He says at once to the Pythagorean, the Eleatic, the atomist, the Platonist, the Stagyrite: Vain men, you are out of your depth. The same inspired caution is as good for Spinoza the most modern idealist or monist.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions: Secular

“Surely, the minister of a divine Redeemer should mount his pulpit with a more holy dread, by as much as he discusses a more sacred theme and more everlasting destinies. To preach a sermon is a great and awful task. Woe to that man, who slights it with a perfunctory preparation and a careless heart.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“If you would induce your hearer to adopt a given course, you must not only prove to his wisdom that it is the proper means to its end, but you must show to his heart that the end is desirable. Hence all suasive discourse, whatever its particular topic, may be reduced to two elements: that which places the proposition in the category of the true, and that which shows it in the category of the good. Both elements are essential to the oration. The latter may be present only by implication, but unless it is virtually present there is no rhetorical discourse.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“It is usually wise to extend this fidelity to the text, not only to its abstract doctrine, but to its imagery. Let the sermon wear, in the main, the same figurative drapery with the passage on which it is founded.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence

“there are three stages through which preaching has repeatedly passed with the same results. The first is that in which scriptural truth is faithfully presented in scriptural garb – that is to say, not only are all the doctrines asserted which truly belong to the revealed system of redemption, but they are presented in that dress and connection in which the Holy Spirit has presented them without seeking any other from human science. This state of the pulpit marks the golden age of the Church. The second is the transition stage. In this, the doctrines taught are still those of the Scriptures, but their relations are moulded into conformity with the prevalent human dialectics. God’s truth is now shorn of a part of its power over the soul. The third stage is then near, in which not only are the methods and explanations conformed to the philosophy of the day, but the doctrines themselves contradict the truth of the Word.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney, Evangelical Eloquence