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Quote by Samuel Rutherford

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The Letters of Samuel Rutherford

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Author

Samuel Rutherford
Samuel Rutherford

Samuel Rutherford was a 17th-century Scottish theologian and writer whose works had a profound impact on religious and political fields, particularly within the Protestant movement. He is known for his contributions to Christian ethics and political theory. more

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“Resistance is dauntless audacity of the lesser against the greater through a will to suffering—the essential quality of existing—because suffering most clearly evinces the will-power of the sufferer. History is the story of ‘I’ as observed and evaluated by ‘me.’ When the history is written by my hands, I will fear nothing and live as if I am the history.”

“In this single lifetime, I have lived in different worlds, joined different groups and walked many different paths. The truth is all paths involve a great deal of sacrifice, suffering and they wear you down. However, you have to walk the path that you find worth suffering for, and only you can find comfort in pain. True life fulfillment is finding that or those you can suffer for, willingly and without repression.”

“...when a heartbroken daughter of the King offers her pain and suffering to Christ, the enemy suffers a great defeat. Do we feel strong? No, we feel heartbroken. But when we enter into that divine exchange and take our sorrow to Christ, we become strong in His strength.”

“A true spouse of Christ gives little thought to herself. A person who constantly thinks of himself is rarely at peace, nor is a person who has no control of his desires, who yearns for material things beyond his means. Whoever has more concern for his body than he has for his soul, who insists on his own will instead of God’s will, who is more anxious about time than he is about eternity, more conscious of the absence of comforts than he is about the presence of God, more anxious to be loved and pampered than he is to love and suffer, more interested in receiving favors and being consoled than he is in aiding his neighbor and comforting others—there is a person who seldom knows peace.”

“The philosopher and ethicist Jonathan Glover reports the story of Odilo Globocnik, the Nazi SS leader in Lublin, Poland, who recalled an incident in which he expressed to another Nazi officer, a Major Hofle, how much it bothered him to think about the Polish children freezing to death while being transported by the Nazis from Lublin to Warsaw. He could not look at these young children without thinking of his own three-year-old niece. Hofle, he recalled, looked at me 'like [I was] an idiot.' Sometime later, Hofle’s own baby twins died of diphtheria and, at the cemetery, he cried out that it was heaven’s punishment for his misdeeds.”