The Loveliness of Christ

"O pity for evermore that there should be such a one as Christ Jesus, so boundless, so bottomless, and so incomparable in infinite excellency, and sweetness, and so few souls to take Him! O, you poor dry and dead souls, why will you not come here with your empty vessels and your empty souls to this huge, and fair, and deep, and sweet well of life, and fill all your empty vessels? O, how Christ is so large in sweetness and worth, and we so narrow, pinched, so ebb, and so void of all happiness, and yet men will not take him! They lose their love miserably, who will not bestow it upon this Lovely One.


- Samuel Rutherford (1600?-1661), a Scottish divine and delegate to the Westminster Assembly. He wrote in his letters, "I am most gladly content that Christ breaketh all my idols in pieces: it hath put a new edge upon my blunted love to Christ. I see He is jealous of my love, and will have all to Himself."

Tears for the Lost

"Should you not weep over such a people, and should not your tears interrupt your words? Should you not cry aloud, and show them their transgressions; and entreat and beseech them as for life and death?"


- Richard Baxter (1615-1691), was a very influential puritan and enemy of the state in London. His book, A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live, was instrumental in the conversion of thousands. In it he writes, “We are commanded to beseech and entreat you to accept the offer and turn; to tell you what preparation is made by Christ; what mercy stays for you; what patience waits on you… We must tell you of the wrath that is on you already, and the death that you are born under for the breach of the law of works. But this is only to show you the need of mercy, and to provoke you to esteem the grace of the Redeemer."