Practise What You Preach Quotes

Do you wonder then that this man’s behaviour used to puzzle me tremendously? He was an ordinary clergyman at that time as well as being Headmaster, and I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and all the rest of it and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules. So what was it all about? I used to ask myself. Did they preach one thing and practise another, these men of God? And if someone had told me at the time that this flogging clergyman was one day to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never have believed it. It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.

Ah!” he exclaimed, “how right you were to tell me to marry respectably; to have a solid position; to live in decorous fear of the world and one’s wife; and to command the envy of the poor, the good opinion of the rich. You have practised what you preach.

He was a good guy, my old man: simple, old-fashioned. Physically, he was built like a feather-weight, and he wore these thick, black Ronnie Barker glasses. He would say to me,‘You might not have a good education, but good manners don’t cost you anything.’ And he practised what he preached: he’d always give up his seat on the bus for a woman or help an old lady across the road. A good man. I really miss him.

She felt safe for a while and derived solace from the reflection that there would always be church. If she were a governess all her life there would be church. There was a little sting of guilt in the thought. It would be practising deception.... To despise it all, to hate the minister and the choir and the congregation and yet to come—running—she could imagine herself all her life running, at least in her mind, weekly to some church—working her fingers into their gloves and pretending to take everything for granted and to be just like everybody else and really thinking only of getting into a quiet pew and ceasing to pretend. It was wrong to use church like that. She was wrong—all wrong. It couldn't be helped. Who was there who could help her? She imagined herself going to a clergyman and saying she was bad and wanted to be good—even crying. He would be kind and would pray and smile—and she would be told to listen to sermons in the right spirit. She could never do that.... There she felt she was on solid ground. Listening to sermons was wrong... people ought to refuse to be preached at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of, more base in submitting... those men's sermons were worse than women's smiles... just as insincere at any rate... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not agree and that things were not simple and settled... but you could not stop a sermon. It was so unfair. The service might be lovely, if you did not listen to the words; and then the man got up and went on and on from unsound premises until your brain was sick... droning on and on and getting more and more pleased with himself and emphatic... and nothing behind it. As often as not you could pick out the logical fallacy if you took the trouble.... Preachers knew no more than anyone else... you could see by their faces... sheeps' faces.... What a terrible life... and wives and children in the homes taking them for granted....

Our fundamental impulses are neither good nor bad: they are ethically neutral. Education should aim at making them take forms that are good. The old method, still beloved by Christians, was to thwart instinct; the new method is to train it. Take love of power: it is useless to preach Christian humility, which merely makes the impulse take hypocritical forms. What you have to do is to provide beneficent outlets for it. The original native impulse can be satisfied in a thousand ways—oppression, politics, business, art, science, all satisfy it when successfully practised. A man will choose the outlet for his love of power that corresponds with his skill; according to the type of skill given him in youth, he will choose one occupation or another. The purpose of our public schools is to teach the technique of oppression and no other; consequently they produce men who take up the white man’s burden. But if these men could do science, many of them might prefer it. Of two activities which a man has mastered, he will generally prefer the more difficult: no chess-player will play draughts. In this way, skill may be made to minister to virtue.

But why, an impatient critic will immediately object, should our forgiveness depend on Christ’s death? Why does God not simply forgive us, without the necessity of the cross? ‘God will pardon me’, Heinrich Heine protested. ‘That’s his métier [his job, his speciality].’4 After all, the objector might continue, if we sin against each other, we are required to forgive each other. So why should God not practise what he preaches? Why should he not be as generous as he expects us to be? Two answers need to be given to these questions. The first was given at the end of the eleventh century by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote in his magnificent book Why God Became Man: ‘You have not yet considered the seriousness of sin.’5 The second answer might be: ‘You have not yet considered the majesty of God.’ To draw an analogy between our forgiveness of each other and God’s forgiveness of us is very superficial. We are not God but private individuals, while he is the maker of heaven and earth, Creator of the very laws we break. Our sins are not purely personal injuries but a wilful rebellion against him. It is when we begin to see the gravity of sin and the majesty of God that our questions change. No longer do we ask why God finds it difficult to forgive sins, but how he finds it possible. As one writer has put it, ‘forgiveness is to man the plainest of duties; to God it is the profoundest of problems’.6 Why may forgiveness be described as a ‘problem’ to God? Because of who he is in his innermost being. Of course he is love (1 John 4:8, 16), but his love is not sentimental love; it is holy love. How then could God punish sin (as in justice he must) without contradicting his love? Or how could God pardon sin (as in love he yearned to do) without compromising his justice? How, confronted by human evil, could God be true to himself as holy love? How could he act simultaneously to express his holiness and his love? This is the divine dilemma that God resolved on the cross. For on the cross, when Jesus died, God himself in Christ bore the judgment we deserved, in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. The full penalty of sin was borne – not, however, by us, but by God in Christ. On the cross divine love and justice were reconciled.

They addressed the crowd, exhorting them to repentance and bearing testimony to the truth. When their sentence was read out they reproached the magistrates and the jury for shedding innocent blood, and these excused themselves by saying that they acted under compulsion of the Emperor…. “O blind world” exclaimed Mändl “each man should act according to his own heart and conscience, but you condemn us according to the Emperor’s order!” They preached further to the people, Mändl continuing until he was hoarse. “Do stop, my Hans!” cried the magistrate, but Mändl continued, and said: “What I have taught and testified is the Divine truth.” They spoke up to the moment of their death, for no one would hinder them. One of them was so ill that it was feared he might die before he could be executed, so he was beheaded first. Then the other turned to the executioner and cried with triumphant courage: “Here I forsake wife and child, house and farm, body and life for the sake of the faith and the truth”, then kneeled down and offered his head to the fatal blow. Hans Mändl was bound to a ladder and cast alive into the flames where the bodies of his fellow-martyrs had already been thrown. There was one witness, Paul Lenz, who so took all this to heart that he shortly after joined the despised disciples, to share with them in the sufferings of Christ.

You can’t live your life being celebrated for beautifully preaching what you will never practise, and this was the certainty that had begun Campbell’s trouble. He’d always written rather blithely about goodness, truth and harmony, but hadn’t he, in actual fact, travelled far from these things, and had he any choice now but to find his way back?

If I was asked to choose a friend from history to have dinner with, I’d definitely pick Muhammad Ali, because he was the same person, inside and out. He practised what he preached, even if it meant going to prison, in a time of social division – a time of war and racial tensions. When you manage to send out important messages from the platform afforded to a world champion athlete, messages that reach around the world, then you’re something far more than simply an athlete. You’re an icon, a symbol – everything. I would have loved to spend some time chatting with him.

Human AF isn't just about being authentic. It's not just about posting a photo with messy hair and #therealme. It's not about sharing a teeny bit of struggle on Facebook. "Guys, my creativity is blocked. See, even people like me have tough days." That still has a tone of I have my shit together. Being Human AF is about being authentic about where we're being inauthentic. Like saying "You know what guys? I've been saying that I'm totally on board this climate change thing. But behind the scenes, I've made zero changes in my life." Cos you're human AF. It's about recognizing the parts of us, thoughts, behaviours, or feelings that are so in opposition of who we think we are, that we barely even admit them to ourselves. Like how you're a spiritually sound lightworker who meditates wearing white in the mornings and practises reiki to heal others, but 10 minutes later pulls the finger at someone who cuts you off on the freeway yelling, "Fuck off dickhead!" Cos you're human AF. And because road rage is real. Human AF is being honest about where we are being hypocritical, where we're saying one thing and practising another, where we're still really struggling ourselves in an area we claim to have nailed. Like being a really powerful health and wellness coach and preaching healthy habits, yet in the evening you still eat 45g of sugar before bed cos you just haven't quite nailed the harmonious relationship with food you're teaching to others. These so called dualities — good vs. bad, positive vs. negative — are not dualities at all. The reiki and the road rage are equal parts magic and human.

THE LIFE OF THE BUDDHA 1. Question. Of what religion[1] are you? Answer. The Buddhist. 2. Q. What is Buddhism? A. It is a body of teachings given out by the great personage known as the Buddha. 3. Q. Is "Buddhism" the best name for this teaching? A. No; that is only a western term: the best name for it is Bauddha Dharma. 4. Q. Would you call a person a Buddhist who had merely been born of Buddha parents? A. Certainly not. A Buddhist is one who not only professes belief in the Buddha as the noblest of Teachers, in the Doctrine preached by Him, and in the Brotherhood of Arhats, but practises His precepts in daily life.