Austin Phelps was an influential American Congregational minister, educator and author.
He attended various institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Divinity School.
He served as the pastor of ‘Pine Street Church’ in Boston and later as the professor of sacred rhetoric and homiletics at ‘Andover Theological Seminary’.
His tenure as president of Andover from 1869 to 1879 ended due to ill health.
Phelps published several works, notably ‘The Still Hour,’ ‘Theory of Preaching,’ and ‘English Style in Public Discourse,’ which became standard theological textbooks and are still in print.
He was thrice married and had five children, one of whom, renamed Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward in honor of her mother, became a noted feminist and author.
See also: William Barclay Quotes from the Scottish Author & Theologian and Paul Washer Quotes on Salvation and Prayer.
I have compiled the top quotes by Austin Phelps below.
Best Austin Phelps Quotes
A disciplined conscience is a man’s best friend. It may not be his most amiable, but it is his most faithful monitor. ~ Austin Phelps.
Are you living for the things you are praying for? ~ Austin Phelps.
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought. ~ Austin Phelps.
Wear the old coat and buy the new book. ~ Austin Phelps.
We never feel Christ to be a reality, until we feel Him to be a necessity. ~ Austin Phelps.
We are never more like Christ than in prayers of intercession. ~ Austin Phelps.
Through its whole history the Christian religion has developed supreme affinities for best things. ~ Austin Phelps.
Christianity is the only system of faith which combines religious beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. It builds ethics on religion. ~ Austin Phelps.
The tendency of Christian ideas is to mental growth. The mind must expand that takes them in with cordial sympathy. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus wrought in him an intellectual as well as a moral revolution. ~ Austin Phelps.
Prayer is the preface to the book of Christian living; the text of the new life sermon; the girding on of the armor for battle; the pilgrim’s preparation for his journey. It must be supplemented by action or it amounts to nothing. ~ Austin Phelps.
Also read: Albert Mohler quotes and Kirk Cameron quotes.
Top Austin Phelps Quotes
It has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We may lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often long alone with God. ~ Austin Phelps.
Possibly our hearts are shockingly deceitful in such iniquity. Are we strangers to an experience like this – that when we mourn over our cold prayers as a misfortune, we evade a search of that disputed territory for the cause of them, through fear that we shall find it there, and we struggle to satisfy ourselves with an increase of spiritual duties which shall cost us no sacrifice? ~ Austin Phelps.
If we suffer our faith to drop down from the lofty conception of prayer as having a lodgment in the very counsels of God, by which the universe is swayed, the plain practicalness of prayer as the Scriptures teach it, and as prophets and apostles and our Lord himself performed it, drops proportionately; and in that proportion, our motive to prayer dwindles. ~ Austin Phelps.
Vigilance in watching opportunity; tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity; force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost of possible achievement – these are the martial virtues which must command success. ~ Austin Phelps.
Famous Austin Phelps Quotes
In the destiny of every moral being there is an object more worthy of God than happiness. It is character. And the grand aim of man’s creation is the development of a grand character, and grand character is, by its very nature, the product of probationary discipline. ~ Austin Phelps.
Genius is not essential to good preaching, but a live man is. ~ Austin Phelps.
The feeling which will become spontaneous with a Christian, under the influence of such a trust, is this: ‘I come to my devotions this morning, on an errand of real life. This is no romance and no farce. I do not come here to go through a form of words. I have no hopeless desires to express. I have an object to gain. I have an end to accomplish. This is a business in which I am about to engage. ~ Austin Phelps.
The most intelligent hearers are those who enjoy most heartily the simplest preaching. It is not they who clamor for superlatively intellectual or aesthetic sermons. Daniel Webster used to complain of some of the preaching to which he listened. “In the house of God” he wanted to meditate “upon the simple varieties, and the undoubted facts of religion;” not upon mysteries and abstractions. ~ Austin Phelps.
So these were the 18 top Austin Phelps quotes and sayings.
