No effort is complete without prayer - without definite recognition that the best human endeavor is of no effect if it has not God's blessing behind it.
A God who is good knows no segregation amongst words or names. And were a God to deny his blessing to those who pursue a different path to eternity, there would be no human who should offer worship.
Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.
…Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man, Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire; Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted; Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God; Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal, Less than we fear the love of God.
For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him.