Stephen Charnock Quotes

       Stephen Charnock
       1628-1680
      
       Puritan divine, Stephen Charnock was an English Puritan Presbyterian clergyman born at the St Katherine Cree parish of London. Charnock studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, during which he was converted to the Christian faith, beginning his spiritual journey as a Puritan divine.
      
       He moved to Ireland in 1656 where he became a chaplain to Henry Cromwell, governor of Ireland. In Dublin, he began a regular ministry of preaching to other believers. Those who came to hear him were from different classes of society and differing denominations, and he became widely known for the skill by which he discharged his duties.

God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty.     Topics: Affliction, Beauty, Providence Assurance is the fruit that grows out of the root of faith.     Topics: Assurance     Source: A Puritan Golden Treasury It is less injury to Him to deny His being, than to deny the purity of it; the one makes Him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and a detestable God. He that saith God is not holy speaks much worse that he that saith there is no God at all.     Topics: Atheism     Source: The Existence and Attributes of God. It is the black work of an ungodly man or an atheist, that God is not in all his thoughts. What comfort can be had in the being of God without thinking of him with reverence and delight? A God forgotten is as good as no God to us.     Topics: Atheism, Apathy He [Christ] foresees all the ambushes of Satan, searches into his intention, understands his strategies, and is as ready to speak to the Father for us, as He was to turn back and look Peter into a recovery at the crowing of the cock.     Topics: Christ Now what greater comfort is there than this, that there is one presides in the world who is so wise he cannot be mistaken, so faithful he cannot deceive, so pitiful he cannot neglect his people, and so powerful that he can make stones even to be turned into bread if he please!     Topics: Comfort We often learn more of God under the rod that strikes us than under the staff that comforts us.     Topics: Discipline Without faith we are not fit to desire mercy, without humility we are not fit to receive it, without affection we are not fit to value it, without sincerity we are not fit to improve it. Times of extremity contribute to the growth and exercise of these qualifications.     Topics: Faith, Trials, Growth Had it been published by a voice from heaven, that twelve poor men, taken out of boats and creeks, without any help of learning, should conquer the world to the cross, it might have been thought an illusion against all reason of men; yet we know it was undertaken and accomplished by them.     Topics: Faithful, The Cross Since therefore all things are ordered in subserviency to the good of man, they are so ordered by Him that made both man and them.     Topics: God This boundless desire had not its original from man itself; nothing would render itself restless; something above the bounds of this world implanted those desires after a higher good, and made him restless in everything else. And since the soul can only rest is something infinite, there is something infinite for it to rest in.     Topics: God, Faith, Rest What a curious workmanship is that of the eye, which is in the body, as the sun in the world; set in the head as in a watch-tower, having the softest nerves for receiving the greater multitude of spirits necessary for the act of vision!     Topics: God, Vision