Rufus Jones Quotes

His [Jesus'] so-called ethics ... is indivisibly bound up with His attitude toward the unseen, with His experience of a realm where what ought to be, really is.

New dispensations may await us; the Kingdom may come in ways we never dreamed of; the beyond may be more momentous than we have ever expected, but always and everywhere 'the within' determines 'the beyond,' and character is destiny.

It is not strange that a synoptic writer reports the saying: 'No man knoweth the Father but the Son.' The passage as it stands reported in Matthew may be colored by later theology, but there is a nucleus of absolute truth hidden in the saying. There is no other way to know God but this way of inner love-experience.

Sacrifice, surrender, negation, are inherently involved in any great onwardmarching life. They go with any choice that can be made of a rich and intense life. It is impossible to find without losing, to get without giving, to live without dying. But sacrifice, surrender, negation, are never for their own sake; they are never ends in themselves. They are involved in life itself.

The actual meeting of man with God and God with man is the very crown and culmination of what we can do with our human life here on earth.

Dr. Rufus Jones, in his excellent “Studies in Mystical Religion” defines his subject as follows: “I shall use the word to express the type of religion which puts the emphasis on immediate awareness of relation with God, on direct and intimate consciousness of the Divine Presence. It is religion in its most acute, intense and living stage.”4 Thomas Aquinas briefly defines mysticism as cognitio dei experimentalis5 as the knowledge of God through experience. In using this term he leans heavily, like many mystics before and after him, on the words of the Psalmist (Psalm XXXIV, 9): “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.” It is this tasting and seeing, however spiritualized it may become, that the genuine mystic desires.