Devotions by Dr. George Matheson

Dr. George Matheson 1842-1906
        At the request of many I have collected these fugitive devotional pieces which at stray moments I have been contributing to an organ of the Church of Scotland - "Saint Andrew." They have been the diversion from sustained work, and in no other light do I offer them. Yet there are some who cannot study sustained work; they have not leisure enough or they have not health enough. For such, truth must come ''in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye." Any one of these meditations can be read in three minutes; yet three minutes may influence a whole day. Accordingly, I have consented to give them collective form. They will not all appeal equally to every mood of mind. Where one does not appeal, lay it aside, but do not throw it away; what is not your message to-day may be your message tomorrow. It is often said that devotion is a thing of the heart. I do not think it is either merely or mainly so. I hold that all emotion is based upon intellectual conviction. Even your sense of natural beauty is so based. Whence comes that joy with which you gaze on a bit of landscape you call "a picture-scene"? Precisely from your intellectual conviction that it is not a picture; if you believed it to be a painting, your emotion would die altogether. A man may have faith in what he does not understand, but he cannot have emotion in what he does not understand. The heart must have a theory for its own music. Therefore the devotional writer must have a message as much as the expositor. Devotion must be the child of reflection; it may rise on wings, but they must be the wings of thought. The meditations of this little book will appeal to the instinct of prayer just in proportion as they appeal to the teachings of experience; therefore, before all things, I have endeavored to base the feelings of the heart on the conclusions of the mind. Dr. George Matheson

  • Biography 

Devotional Exercises:

  1. Agnosticism that Need Not Despair
  2. Alone with Christ
  3. Architecture of Man
  4. Asceticism
  5. Attractiveness of Christ
  6. Best Tribunal
  7. Burden in Heaven
  8. Catholicity of Christ's Cradle
  9. Chapter in Inward Biography
  10. Christ's Appropriation of the Secular
  11. Christ's Call to the Bereaved
  12. Christian Childhood
  13. Christian Emulation
  14. Cristian Resignation
  15. Christian Simplicity
  16. Congruity between Prayer and its Answer
  17. Curative Wisdom of Jesus
  18. Decline of Reckless Courage
  19. Divine Heredity
  20. Emancipation from School
  21. Fire Without the Lamb
  22. First Recognition of Christ
  23. God's Highest Glory
  24. God's Place for Adversity
  25. Ground of Human Hope
  26. Groundless Fear of God
  27. Hottest Part of Life's Furnace
  28. Inadequacy of Mere Surroundings
  29. Instinct and Reason
  30. Joyousness of Piety
  31. Lazarus Bound
  32. Lateness of Abraham's Sacrifice
  33. Latest Voice of God
  34. Marriage of Prayer and Almsgiving
  35. Marriage of Prayer and Joy
  36. Meeting of Life's Extremes
  37. Men Who Have No Work
  38. Morning and the Afternoon
  39. Pain That Is Divine
  40. Paul's Hymn to Love
  41. Peaceableness after Purity
  42. Peculiarity of Human Greatness
  43. Penalty and Pardon
  44. Permanent Thing
  45. Peter's Type of the Enduring
  46. Place for Religious Research
  47. Place of Human Effort in Religion
  48. Postponement of the Beatific Vision
  49. Prayer for Christ's Sake
  50. Preservation of Waste Things
  51. Principle of Heavenly Rank
  52. Provinces of Love
  53. Real World 
  54. Rejected of the World
  55. Relation of Theism to Christianity
  56. Religion and Immortality
  57. Remedy for a Wounded Heart
  58. Renewal in Christ
  59. Revelation of Heaven that Comes from Earth
  60. Revelation that Retarded
  61. Revelation that Rewarded
  62. Road to a Correct Life
  63. Safeguard Against Despair
  64. Salvation and Dilapidation
  65. Sanctifying of Worldly Gifts
  66. Satan's Choice of a Locality
  67. Secret of Artlessness
  68. Secret of Christian Stooping
  69. Self-Surrender
  70. Service by the Sorrowful
  71. Singular Change of Fashion
  72. Sinlessness of the Second Birth
  73. Slavery witch Glorifies
  74. Sphere where Calm is Essential
  75. Spiritual Environment
  76. Spiritual Preservation
  77. Strength of the Heart
  78. Summer of the Soul
  79. Test of the Self-Emptying
  80. Thanksgiving for the Blessed Dead
  81. Union of Sanctity and Liberty
  82. Unreality
  83. Unuttered Coin
  84. Value of Easter Day
  85. Veiling of God's Face

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