Where is fate and who is fate? We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has the blame, none else has the praise. We make our own destiny.
The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian.
Each must assimilate the spirit of other religion and yet preserve his individuality and follow his own law of growth.
Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.
Our error today is that we do not expect a converted man to be a transformed man, and as a result of this error our churches are full of substandard Christians. A revival is among other things a return to the belief that real faith invariably produces holiness of heart and righteousness of life.
Far be it from us to doubt that all number is known to Him 'Whose understanding is infinite' (Ps. 147:5). The infinity of number, though there be no numbering of infinite numbers, is yet not incomprehensible by Him Whose understanding is infinite. And thus, if everything which is comprehended is defined or made finite by the comprehension of him who knows it, then all infinity is in some ineffable way made finite to God, for it is comprehensible by His knowledge.
But I'm mindful in a free society that people can worship if they want to or not. You're equally an American if you choose to worship an Almighty and if you choose not to. If you're a Christian, Jew or Muslim you're equally an American. That's the great thing about America is the right to worship the way you see fit. Prayer and religion sustain me. I receive calmness in the storms of the presidency. I love the fact that people pray for me and my family all around the country. Somebody asked me one time, how do you know? I said I just feel it.
The Imitation of Christ is a cherished treasure of the Christian world. This great book was written by a Roman Catholic monk. "Written", perhaps, is not the proper word. It would be more appropriate to say that each letter of the book is marked deep with the heart's blood of the great soul who had renounced all for his love of Christ.
So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead. Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we're sinful and we're flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God.
Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.
The images of mens wits and knowledge remain in books. They generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages
I am much indebted to the good Christian people of the country for their constant prayers and consolations; and to no one of them, more than to yourself.