From the “Preface” to Kuyper’s 1899 edition of The Work of the Holy Spirit:

Methodism was born out of the spiritual decline of the Episcopal Church of England and Wales. It arose as the reaction of the individual and of the spiritual subjective against the destructive power of the objective in the community as manifested in the Church of England. As such the reaction was precious and undoubtedly a gift of God, and in its workings it would have continued just as salutary if it had retained its character of a predominant reaction. It should have supposed the Church as a community as an objective power, and in this objective domain it should have vindicated the significance of the individual spiritual life and of subjective confessing [Emphasis CCS]. 

But it failed to do this. From vindicating the subjective rights of the individual it soon passed into antagonism against the objective rights of the community. This resulted dogmatically in the controversy about the objective work of God, viz., in His decree and His election, and ecclesiastically in antagonism against the object work of the office through confession. It gave supremacy to the subjective element in man’s free will and to the individual element in the deciding of unchurchly conflicts in the Church. And so it retained no other aim than the conversion of individual sinners; and for this work it abandoned the organic, and retained only the mechanical method. 

  . . .

The Work of the Holy Spirit may not be displaced by the activity of the human spirit (Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, xiii-xiv).

A lengthy one, but beautiful.

At this point it becomes increasingly difficult to give Ransom’s experiences in any certain form. How long he lay beside the river at the cavern mouth eating and sleeping and waking only to eat and sleep again, he has no idea. He thinks it was only a day or two, but from the state of his body when this period of convalescence ended I should imagine it must have been more like a fortnight or three weeks. It was a time to be remembered only in dreams as we remember infancy. Indeed it was a second infancy, in which he was breast-fed by the planet Venus herself: unweaned till he moved from that place. Three impressions of this long Sabbath remain. One is the endless sound of rejoicing water. Another is the delicious life that he sucked from the clusters which almost seemed to bow themselves unmasked into his outstretched hands. The third is the song. Now high in air above him, now welling up as if from glens and valleys far below, it floated through his sleep and was the first sound at every waking. It was formless as the song of a bird, yet it was not a bird’s voice. As a bird’s voice is to a flute, so this was to a cello: low and ripe and tender, full-bellied, rich and golden-brown: passionate too, but not with the passions of men” (C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, 185).

“Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Wesley — all were men of high education who loved learning and used their minds until their work was done. Study the great turning points of Christian history, and in every case you will find behind them solid learning used to the glory of God. With all due honor to Moody and Spurgeon, who lacked formal education but who valued it so highly that they both founded schools, we must acknowledge that Christian history has in the main been made by men of the highest intellectual attainment” (Frank E. Gaebelein, The Pattern of God’s Truth: Problems of Integration in Christian Education, 105-106).

“Only a small minority of Protestant youth are receiving elementary and secondary education with a genuinely Christian integration. The vast majority are in public schools, where a consistent Christian world view cannot be imparted, however good the emphasis upon conduct and character may be. To be sure, in some cases a strongly Christian home and a church with a vital educational program may supply the lack; yet the tide of secularism in American has risen so high that it is difficult to give children in their impressionable years a thorough-going Christian view of life” (Frank E. Gaebelein, The Pattern of God’s Truth: Problems of Integration in Christian Education, 111).

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That originally published in 1954. It is as applicable today (if not more so) as it was then.

“This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself — perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film” (C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, 48).

“How can we not obey what we love?” (116)

“Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places” (140).

An interesting article about how Calvinism is flourishing in China, of all places.

On the efficacy of preaching, Michael Horton insists “It is effective because God has promised to dispense his saving grace then and there by the Spirit, and it grows organically out of the logic of the message itself because it is an announcement of something that has been accomplished by God, rather than an incentive to get sinners to save themselves by sheer force of will or effort. It is good news, not good advice, good production value, or good ideas.”

Horton elaborates on this good news: “. . . we can always count on God being where he has promised to meet us . . . . The power of the Spirit is linked to a promise; namely, a promise that faith comes by hearing the gospel preached (Rom. 10:8, 17)” (A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God-Centered Worship, 64-65).

“The secret of Luther’s power lay in the same direction [the endeavor of prevailing with God for men in prayer]. Theodorus [a friend of Luther] said of him: “I overheard him in prayer, but, good God, with what life and spirit did he pray! It was with so much reverence, as if here speaking to God, yet with so much confidence as if he were speaking to his friend.” My brethren, let me beseech you to be men of prayer. Great talents you may never have, but you will do well enough without them if you abound in intercession” (C. H. Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, 45).

“If men have no likeness to the Father in heaven, it is vain to talk of their being His “sons.” If we know nothing of holiness we may flatter ourselves as we please, but we have not got the Holy Spirit dwelling in us: we are dead, and must be brought to life again–we are lost, and must be found. “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they,” and they only, “are the sons of God.” (Rom. viii. 14.) We must show by our lives the family we belong to.–We must let men see by our good conversation that we are indeed the children of the Holy One, or our son-ship is but an empty name” (J. C. Ryle, Holiness, 42).

“With this expression of spirituality [what the author calls “dominion religion” – a form of spirituality that is derived from application of Genesis 1:28] there is a desire to develop the world for the benefit of others and the glory of God. This development occurs as God’s people are serious about applying His Word to very area of life. It also involves a willingness to make sacrifices to further His kingdom. Although Christians have held this view during much of history, only a minority of Christians seem to be aware of it today. most Christians, at least in America, are of the escapist variety. They see the value of their faith as it applies to their own personal piety, but don’t seem to expect it to have much influence in the world. The kind of change our world needs will only come about with a change in worldview where men do not seek power over one another, but seek power of God to build His kingdom together [CCS: This kingdom building is a liturgical endeavor at its root–involving both worldview and worship.]. There’s only one spiritual option out there today that can bring this about, and it’s the practice of dominion spirituality” (David Bostrom, Get Dominion: You’ve Been Called to Fulfill a Mission, 73).