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Ships Of Pearl
161 pages, Hardcover
About the author
F.W. Boreham
126 books57 followersRev. Dr. Frank W. Boreham
(March 3rd 1871 – May 18th 1959) Served, and wrote, in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia.
(March 3rd 1871 – May 18th 1959) Served, and wrote, in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 5, 2026
I cannot seem to give Boreham anything less than a 5-star rating. He makes me think and re-envision my life and my beliefs in ways that nobody else has ever done. I am so grateful that he was so prolific. I will always wish that he had written more, but I am thankful that I have so much to pull from. I will soon have to start back at the beginning and revisit his works, as I am loath to give up his essays as my nighttime meditation companions. I did not record all that I marked in this volume, but these are some passages that I particularly loved.
“I have always found it a mistake to attempt to complete a manuscript in one day. I like to do part of it – enough to get the theme well on to my mind – and then go to bed with the work half-done. I do not consciously review the matter during the night: yet I invariably wake up with a batch of ideas that were not there the previous day.”
“The things that God is pleased to reveal make it easy for us to be patient concerning the things that He is pleased to conceal.”
“That, of course, is what old people are for – to have their brains picked by younger ones.”
“It is not too much to say that all literature divides itself into these two classes – biography and autobiography. Take the novelists, for example. The old-fashioned novelist was a biographer. Describing certain characters, he told us what they said and did. It was George Eliot who set the new fashion. George Eliot stands in our literature as the audacious pioneer of introspective romance. She writes from the centre; she is in the secrets of all her characters; she scrutinizes their motives, their sensations, their passions; she tells the tale from the inside. Her analysis is so good-humoured, so sympathetic and so artistically concealed that we are scarcely aware that our authoress is thridding the intricate maze of a tortuous and acute psychological investigation. Yet so it is. It is the very spirit of autobiography.”
“Autobiography has no time for important things. It is not the important things that fascinate us.”
“The average reader is very much in love with life; and in a ponderous recital of important happenings – which, of necessity, are commonplace happenings - there is no throbbing life whatever.”
“I’ve shown that all the best writing – fiction, history and what not – is autobiographical, psychological, spiritual. So is all the best preaching. On Good Friday I heard two sermons. In the morning the preacher described the scene on Calvary so vividly that one could almost fancy that he himself had witnessed the Crucifixion. Yet, somehow, he left us cold. In the afternoon, the minister scarcely referred to the cross, the nails, the thorns – the externals of the world’s supreme tragedy. He preached on Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani? He dealth so movingly with the dereliction, the travail and the heartbreak of the Cross, and enlarged so powerfully upon the unutterable love that led the Saviour to embrace that abysmal anguish, that he brought us into vital touch with his living Lord and left us there.”
“I sometimes hear it said that such-and-such a man thinks too much of himself. It is impossible. The man who thinks too highly of himself has never yet been born. A man cannot think too much of himself. He may think too little of others or he may think unworthily of God. But man is so stupendous, so dynamic, so full of potential, so sublime that any exaggeration of his spiritual and eternal magnificence is out of the question.”
“The Church is Christ’s universal body – the body in which He can appear to any kindred or tribe or people in their own style and garb and language.”
“When you come to think of it, thought-reading is the very essence of religion. Everything, in this world and in every other, depends upon a man’s ability to read the mind of God.”
“Strictly speaking,” says Victor Hugo, in his Toilers of the Sea, “strictly speaking, the human face is a mask. The real man is that which is concealed behind it. The soul is the reality.”
“If every face is the revelation of a personality, it follows that the face of Jesus is the most exquisite and most accurate revelation that has ever been given of the divine mind…the man who has once looked into the thorn-crowned face of Jesus has looked into the very heart of the Eternal.”
“When Christ does anything which impressively brings home to us His intense humanity, there always follows something to remind us that He was the Very God. Thus…
He was born a tiny babe at Bethlehem – He was as human as that! Yet angels filled the air with heavenly song – He was as divine as that!
He rested, tired and thirsty, on Samaria’s well – He was as human as that! Yet He told the woman whom He found there that she had but to ask and He would give her the water of life everlasting – He was as divine as that!
He slept, exhausted, in the bow of a boat – He was as human as that! Yet when He rose and rebuked the angry waves, they crouched like dogs at His feet – He was as divine as that!
He wept with the sisters beside the tomb at Bethany – He was as human as that! Yet He cried, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ and he that was dead left the sepulchre – He was as divine as that!”
“It would be a great thing for the Church to go to the world with so true and so attractive and so life-like a representation of her Lord that men would forget the unworthy caricatures of Him ow which their eyes are tired.”
“The soul needs, for its highest development, the awful quiet of God’s holy places. Restless activity – even religious activity – can never satisfy its hunger.”
“The controversialist who fancies that he is all right, that everybody else is all wrong, and that the chief aim of discussion is to crush all opposition, is hopeless. He is devoid of the essential faculty of being able to project himself into his opponent’s mind; he is entirely unable to see the matter from his antagonist’s point of view. No controversy, so conducted, can possibly get anywhere.”
“When we come to the end of ourselves, we come to the beginning of salvation.”
“Whatever sensations and revolutions the future may have in store for us, we can never hope to recapture the delight that men found in books when books were very few and extremely expensive. Sir John Herschel has told of the excitement that, a hundred and fifty years ago, convulsed an English village when one of the inhabitants became possessed of a copy of Richardson’s Pamela. The village blacksmith, perched on his anvil, read it aloud, evening by evening, to an audience that thronged the spacious smithy. And ‘at length, when there arrived that happy turn of fortune which brings the hero and the heroine together, and sets them living long and happily according to the most approved conventions, the villagers were so delighted that, with a glad shout, they rushed out of the smithy, procured the church keys, and set the parish bells a-ringing.’ Such scenes are never likely to be re-enacted, not because there are so few books, but because there are so many.”
“The well-read man reads, not that he may boast of the books that he has read, nor that he may quote them or criticize them or discuss them or in any other way display with elation his familiarity with them, nor even in order that he may enlarge the range of his own mind and multiply the number of his own ideas, but just because here are new worlds waiting – worlds so wonderful that he cannot deny himself the raptures that they offer.”
“The well-read man is the man who reads well.”
“A wise use of the art of ridicule is one of life’s great enrichments.”
“Sir Walter Scott weaves from the recesses of his imagination a charming story by means of which we are able to visualize the life of the sixteenth century more realistically than we could possibly do through the medium of the history books.”
“Jesus Himself, the supreme Master of every gracious art, displayed a rare skill in making men see the absurdity of their prejudices and passions. Many a man must have gone home, after listening to those wondrous utterances by the roadside and the hillside and the lakeside, to laugh at himself with a laughter that led him half-way to repentance.”
“I have caught myself wondering whether the two things – poesy and pistons – are as remote from each other as Jack seems to think. The work of the engineer represents the poetry of activity; and the poetry of activity is one of the highest forms of poetry.”
“Is it any wonder that the only vehicle that has effectively conveyed to the little minds of men any inkling of the majestic story of Creation has been the vehicle of poetry? The opening chapters of Genesis, however interpreted, represent one of the choicest gems in the poetry of the ages.”
“God never sends a man into the world without first preparing the world for his coming.”
“All communications were wireless communications a century ago; the wonder of the wires had not then been discovered! (How I would love to see Mr. Boreham’s face if he were to see what the word wireless means today.)
“I have always found it a mistake to attempt to complete a manuscript in one day. I like to do part of it – enough to get the theme well on to my mind – and then go to bed with the work half-done. I do not consciously review the matter during the night: yet I invariably wake up with a batch of ideas that were not there the previous day.”
“The things that God is pleased to reveal make it easy for us to be patient concerning the things that He is pleased to conceal.”
“That, of course, is what old people are for – to have their brains picked by younger ones.”
“It is not too much to say that all literature divides itself into these two classes – biography and autobiography. Take the novelists, for example. The old-fashioned novelist was a biographer. Describing certain characters, he told us what they said and did. It was George Eliot who set the new fashion. George Eliot stands in our literature as the audacious pioneer of introspective romance. She writes from the centre; she is in the secrets of all her characters; she scrutinizes their motives, their sensations, their passions; she tells the tale from the inside. Her analysis is so good-humoured, so sympathetic and so artistically concealed that we are scarcely aware that our authoress is thridding the intricate maze of a tortuous and acute psychological investigation. Yet so it is. It is the very spirit of autobiography.”
“Autobiography has no time for important things. It is not the important things that fascinate us.”
“The average reader is very much in love with life; and in a ponderous recital of important happenings – which, of necessity, are commonplace happenings - there is no throbbing life whatever.”
“I’ve shown that all the best writing – fiction, history and what not – is autobiographical, psychological, spiritual. So is all the best preaching. On Good Friday I heard two sermons. In the morning the preacher described the scene on Calvary so vividly that one could almost fancy that he himself had witnessed the Crucifixion. Yet, somehow, he left us cold. In the afternoon, the minister scarcely referred to the cross, the nails, the thorns – the externals of the world’s supreme tragedy. He preached on Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani? He dealth so movingly with the dereliction, the travail and the heartbreak of the Cross, and enlarged so powerfully upon the unutterable love that led the Saviour to embrace that abysmal anguish, that he brought us into vital touch with his living Lord and left us there.”
“I sometimes hear it said that such-and-such a man thinks too much of himself. It is impossible. The man who thinks too highly of himself has never yet been born. A man cannot think too much of himself. He may think too little of others or he may think unworthily of God. But man is so stupendous, so dynamic, so full of potential, so sublime that any exaggeration of his spiritual and eternal magnificence is out of the question.”
“The Church is Christ’s universal body – the body in which He can appear to any kindred or tribe or people in their own style and garb and language.”
“When you come to think of it, thought-reading is the very essence of religion. Everything, in this world and in every other, depends upon a man’s ability to read the mind of God.”
“Strictly speaking,” says Victor Hugo, in his Toilers of the Sea, “strictly speaking, the human face is a mask. The real man is that which is concealed behind it. The soul is the reality.”
“If every face is the revelation of a personality, it follows that the face of Jesus is the most exquisite and most accurate revelation that has ever been given of the divine mind…the man who has once looked into the thorn-crowned face of Jesus has looked into the very heart of the Eternal.”
“When Christ does anything which impressively brings home to us His intense humanity, there always follows something to remind us that He was the Very God. Thus…
He was born a tiny babe at Bethlehem – He was as human as that! Yet angels filled the air with heavenly song – He was as divine as that!
He rested, tired and thirsty, on Samaria’s well – He was as human as that! Yet He told the woman whom He found there that she had but to ask and He would give her the water of life everlasting – He was as divine as that!
He slept, exhausted, in the bow of a boat – He was as human as that! Yet when He rose and rebuked the angry waves, they crouched like dogs at His feet – He was as divine as that!
He wept with the sisters beside the tomb at Bethany – He was as human as that! Yet He cried, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ and he that was dead left the sepulchre – He was as divine as that!”
“It would be a great thing for the Church to go to the world with so true and so attractive and so life-like a representation of her Lord that men would forget the unworthy caricatures of Him ow which their eyes are tired.”
“The soul needs, for its highest development, the awful quiet of God’s holy places. Restless activity – even religious activity – can never satisfy its hunger.”
“The controversialist who fancies that he is all right, that everybody else is all wrong, and that the chief aim of discussion is to crush all opposition, is hopeless. He is devoid of the essential faculty of being able to project himself into his opponent’s mind; he is entirely unable to see the matter from his antagonist’s point of view. No controversy, so conducted, can possibly get anywhere.”
“When we come to the end of ourselves, we come to the beginning of salvation.”
“Whatever sensations and revolutions the future may have in store for us, we can never hope to recapture the delight that men found in books when books were very few and extremely expensive. Sir John Herschel has told of the excitement that, a hundred and fifty years ago, convulsed an English village when one of the inhabitants became possessed of a copy of Richardson’s Pamela. The village blacksmith, perched on his anvil, read it aloud, evening by evening, to an audience that thronged the spacious smithy. And ‘at length, when there arrived that happy turn of fortune which brings the hero and the heroine together, and sets them living long and happily according to the most approved conventions, the villagers were so delighted that, with a glad shout, they rushed out of the smithy, procured the church keys, and set the parish bells a-ringing.’ Such scenes are never likely to be re-enacted, not because there are so few books, but because there are so many.”
“The well-read man reads, not that he may boast of the books that he has read, nor that he may quote them or criticize them or discuss them or in any other way display with elation his familiarity with them, nor even in order that he may enlarge the range of his own mind and multiply the number of his own ideas, but just because here are new worlds waiting – worlds so wonderful that he cannot deny himself the raptures that they offer.”
“The well-read man is the man who reads well.”
“A wise use of the art of ridicule is one of life’s great enrichments.”
“Sir Walter Scott weaves from the recesses of his imagination a charming story by means of which we are able to visualize the life of the sixteenth century more realistically than we could possibly do through the medium of the history books.”
“Jesus Himself, the supreme Master of every gracious art, displayed a rare skill in making men see the absurdity of their prejudices and passions. Many a man must have gone home, after listening to those wondrous utterances by the roadside and the hillside and the lakeside, to laugh at himself with a laughter that led him half-way to repentance.”
“I have caught myself wondering whether the two things – poesy and pistons – are as remote from each other as Jack seems to think. The work of the engineer represents the poetry of activity; and the poetry of activity is one of the highest forms of poetry.”
“Is it any wonder that the only vehicle that has effectively conveyed to the little minds of men any inkling of the majestic story of Creation has been the vehicle of poetry? The opening chapters of Genesis, however interpreted, represent one of the choicest gems in the poetry of the ages.”
“God never sends a man into the world without first preparing the world for his coming.”
“All communications were wireless communications a century ago; the wonder of the wires had not then been discovered! (How I would love to see Mr. Boreham’s face if he were to see what the word wireless means today.)
September 5, 2019
One of the best. Anything Boreham did is good, but anything from his later period is gold.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews