Elizabeth Payson Prentiss (1818 – 1878)
Author, well known for her hymn "More Love to Thee, O Christ" and the didactic story Stepping Heavenward (1869).
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"Cheerfully and gratefully I lay myself and all I am or own at the feet of Him who redeemed me with His precious blood, engaging to follow Him, bearing the cross He lays upon me." This is the least I can do, and I do it while my heart lies broken and bleeding at His feet.
Ah, what a life is theirs who live in Christ;
How vast the mystery!
Reaching in height to heaven, and in its depth
The unfathomed sea!
O happy life! life hid with Christ in God!
So making me
At home and by the wayside and abroad,
Alone with Thee.
It sweetens every bit of work to think that I am doing it in humble, far-off, yet real imitation of Jesus.
I am not sure that it is best for us, once safe and secure on the Rock of Ages, to ask ourselves too closely what this and that experience may signify. Is it not better to be thinking of the Rock, not of the feet that stand upon it?
I thought that prattling boys and girls
Would fill this empty room;
That my rich heart would gather flowers
From childhood's opening bloom.
One child and two green graves are mine,
This is God's gift to me;
A bleeding, fainting, broken heart—
This is my gift to Thee.
No truth can be said to be seen as it is until it is seen in its relation to all other truths. In this relation only is it true.
Lay hold on Christ with both your poor, empty hands.
Not till I was shut up to prayer and to the study of God's word by the loss of earthly joys — sickness destroying the flavor of them all — did I begin to penetrate the mystery that is learned under the cross. And wondrous as it is, how simple is this mystery! To love Christ, and to know that I love Him — this is all.
Some of His children must go into the furnace to testify that the Son of God is there with them.
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