Whom do you serve?

“Men often speak as if the perfection of human happiness lay in our being free to do or not to do, to choose and to reject. Now we are indeed thus free, as far as this – that if we do not choose to be Christ’s servants, we can go back to that old bondage from which He rescued us, and be slaves again to the powers of evil. But though we are free to make our situation worse, we are not free to be without service or post of any kind. It is not in man’s nature to be out of all service and to be self-dependent. We may choose our master, but God or mammon we must serve. We cannot possibly be in a neutral or intermediate state. Such a state does not exist. If we will not be Christ’s servants, we are forthwith Satan’s; and Christ sets us free from Satan only by making us His servants.”

-Blessed John Henry Newman, “The Strictness of the Law of Christ”

on the reading of Holy Scripture

“Doubtless Christ spoke no words in vain. The Eternal Wisdom of God did not utter His voice that we might at once catch up His words in an irreverent manner, think we understand them at a glance, and pass over them. But His words endureth forever; it has a depth of meaning suited to all times and places, and hardly and painfully to be understood in any. They who think they enter into it easily, may be quite sure they do not enter into it at all.”

-Bl. John Henry Newman, from “Knowledge of God’s Will Without Obedience”