"What is true contrition? Sorrow for sin in itself, not for sin's consequences."
The Guided Life, Canon Body.
"Remorse and repentance are two very different things. Repentance leads back to life; but remorse ends often in the painless apathy and fatal mortification of despair."
Dean Farrar.
"Penitence is like the dawn.... It is the breaking of the light in the soul,—dark enough sometimes no doubt, but a darkness giving place steadily to the growing light."
Bishop Walsham How.
JUNE 1
"The father says of his profligate son whom he has never done one wise or vigorous thing to make a noble and pure-minded man: 'I cannot tell how it has come. It has not been my fault. I put him into the world and this came out.' The father whose faith has been mean and selfish says the same of his boy who is a sceptic. Everywhere there is this cowardly casting off of responsibilities upon the dead circumstances around us. It is a very hard treatment of the poor, dumb, helpless world which cannot answer to defend itself. It takes us as we give ourselves to it. It is our minister fulfilling our commissions for us upon our own souls. If we say to it, 'Make us noble,' it does make us noble. If we say to it, 'Make us mean,' it does make us mean. And then we take the nobility and say, 'Behold, how noble I have made myself.' And we take the meanness and say, 'See how mean the world has made me.'"
Phillips Brooks.