Quotations from Anthony Norris Groves: Saint and Pioneer by G. H. Lang

To be holy is the chief condition for diffusing the grace of the Holy Spirit. The channel must be clean. —page 19

Think not on a holy life, but on a holy moment as it flies; the first overwhelms the heart by its immensity, the other sweetens and refreshes by its lightness and present stimulus; and yet a succession of holy moments constitutes a holy life. —page 57

If your love glows towards Him, you will have almost an instinctive sense of what will please Him, and that will prove to be a holy life, when followed on from day to day. —page 57

In the education of His children God our Father gives light by degrees; with successive steps of obedience He increases the faith to trust Him; tests faith by larger claims upon it, and so develops and strengthens it to meet yet larger claims and further advance. And each forward step of obedience and sacrifice is rewarded by a fuller freedom of soul from bondage to things earthly and a richer gladness by enjoyment of things heavenly. Thus does the disappointment inherent in things that are transitory, even the lawful things, fade out of life, and is replaced by the satisfaction ministered by the things eternal and unfailing. —page 60

The state of mind most to be avoided by a searcher after truth, is deciding with the understanding that a course is right, but with the will and affections determining against pursuing it: it destroys all honest dealing with God. —page 68

If trust is placed on any thing but God himself the heart is impoverished. —page 76

Nothing more truly denotes the freedom with which Christ sets free than liberation from the thraldom to money, much or little. —page 75

Oh! when will the day come, when the love of Christ will have more power to unite than our foolish regulations have to divide the family of God? —page 121

When a man passes on to even one other man some truth that he has learned from Scripture, it cannot be known what a large harvest will grow. How very careful, therefore, ought we to be to sow in other hearts all truth as we learn it, for seed kept in the barn will not grow, but be useless; and, on the other hand, how very, very careful ought we to be to sow only good seed. When one looks in the Cairo Museum at the recovered specimens of the golden rams or calves worshipped in ancient Egypt, serious thoughts enter the heart. Who first suggested the worship of the golden calf is not known by us. But Aaron and Israel copied it, to the immediate undoing of the people. And after more than four hundred years Jeroboam, the first king of Israel, copied Aaron, using his very words; then every one of the kings of Israel, as the history repeats and repeats, “walked in the sins of Jeroboam”; until at last the ten tribes went into captivity for these iniquities, and are still under the dread judgment. What a fearful harvest from the original suggestion to worship God under the form of a calf. — page 163

…how consolatory it is to feel that holiness is the only influence in the Church of God worthy the ambition of a child of God, and that that influence is as much within the reach of a bed-ridden member of the family, as of those who are flourishing in the zenith of their popularity: and that the prayers of the holy bedew the Church with as many blessings as the labours of the active, if prayers are all that the providence and fatherly dispensations of the most High allow them to offer. —page 257

The moment a man feels adequate to his own wants, his tendency is always to self-reliance, and in order to destroy this, the Lord comes in and breaks his pleasant vessels. —page 271

I find daily that men would rather suffer any measure of bondage in the things of religion than dwell in individual responsibility before God for every action, thought, and affection. —page 272

How slow we are to learn that all the discipline of life is to prepare us for eternity; that nothing that has not God in it, is either worth caring for or desiring. —page 376

[These are selected quotes from the book Anthony Norris Groves: Saint and Pioneer by G. H. Lang]