Puritan Nuggets of Gold # 63

Patience

Patience to the soul is as bread to the body... we eat bread with all our meats, both for health and relish; bread with flesh, bread with fish, bread with broths and fruits. Such is patience to every virtue; we must hope with patience, and pray in patience, and love with patience, and whatsoever good thing we do, let it be done in patience. (Thomas Adams)

The patient man is merry indeed. The jailers that watch him are but his pages of honor, and his very dungeon but the lower side of the vault of heaven. He kisseth the wheel that must kill him; and thinks the stairs of the scaffold of his martyrdom but so many degrees of his ascent to glory. The tormentors are weary of him, the beholders have pity on him, all men wonder at him; and while he seems below all men, below himself, he is above nature. He hath so overcome himself, that nothing can conquer him. (Thomas Adams)

They who are wicked, although they cannot see the goodness of other virtues, yet can see the goodness of patience, and perceive when they see a patient man and an impatient man both sick of one disease; yet both are not troubled alike, but that he who has most patience has most ease, and he who is most impatient is most tormented, like a fish which strives with the hook. (Henry Smith)

To lengthen my patience is the best way to shorten my troubles. (George Swinnock)

Patience must not be an inch shorter than affliction. (Thomas Adams)

Who cares for Caesar when he is dead? But what more efficacious than Christ when He died? He was most practical when He seemed to do nothing. In patience He reigned and triumphed; He subjected the greatest enemies to Himself, satan, and death, and the wrath of God, and all. In the same manner all things are ours, the worst thing that befall God's children, death, and afflictions, and persecutions. There is a kingdom of patience set up in them. The Spirit of God subdues all base fears in us, and a child of God never more triumphs than in his greatest troubles. (Richard Sibbes)

Mercy hath a heaven, and justice a hell, to display itself to eternity, but long-suffering hath only a short-lived earth. (Henry Smith)

Peace

God the Father is called the "God of peace' (Hebrews 13:20). God the Son, the "Prince of peace" (Isaiah 9:6). God the Holy Spirit, the "Spirit ... of peace" (Ephesians 4:3). (Thomas Watson)

The godly man, when he dies, "enters into peace" (Isaiah 57:2); but while he lives, peace must enter into him. (Thomas Watson)

And therefore you who think so basely of the Gospel and the professors of it, because at present their peace and comfort are not come, should know that it is on the way to them, and comes to stay everlastingly with them; whereas your peace is going from you every moment, and is sure to leave you without any hope of returning to you again. Look not how the Christian begins, but ends. (William Gurnall)