Quiet Hints, Chapter 18–"Pettiness”

Notes taken from Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers by Charles E. Jefferson, Chapter 18,"Pettiness."

Certain vices only mar, others lacerate and kill. Not one of them kills more surely than a petty disposition.

The Christian religion is nothing if not large.

A sermon is the life-blood of a an baptized into the spirit of the Lord, and every syllable of all he utters must have in it the weight of a full-statured Christ-like man.

The Gospel from many a pulpit goes forth void because proclaimed by too small a man.

Men of ability have thrown away their influence with their people simply by the display of a pickayunish, close-fisted disposition which rendered them despicable to all who had financial dealings with them.

Not all preachers can be equally talented or equally successful, and blessed is the man who can see his brother marching grandly on in advance of him and join in the hozannas which proclaim his coronation.

Envy is a sin of weakness, and whoever is guilty of it confesses his inferiority.

This touchiness often increases with age, and men with gray hair are sometimes guilty of a crochety and morbid insistence on trifles which stirs up in sensible people both anathemas and tears.

Some men cross the dead line in the pulpit early because they become in their interior life so insufferably petty and foolish.

Of all wretched mortals none is more to be pitied than the minister of Christ who attempts to preach the gospel with a quarrel on his conscience not yet made up and an enemy on his heart not yet forgiven.

A minister of the gospel of love who has an enemy whom he is unable or unwilling to forgive ought to repent or resign.