Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

William Greenough Thayer Shedd

American Theologian

"A man's ideal, like his horizon, is constantly receding from him as he advances toward it."

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

"Is it for the cultivated man, the man of broad and general views, to throw himself without reserve and with all his weight, into what, for aught he yet knows, may be only a cross-current and eddy, instead of the main stream of truth?"

"The law is obligated to punish the transgressor as much as the transgressor is obligated to obey the law ? law has no option. Justice has but one function. The necessity of penalty is as great as the necessity of obligation. The law itself is under law; that is, it is under the necessity of its own nature; and therefore the only possible way whereby a transgressor can escape the penalty of the law, is for a substitute to endure it for him. The deep substrata and base of all God's ethical attributes are eternal law and impartial justice."

"The piecemeal criticism which, like the fly, scans only the edge of a plinth in the great edifice upon which it crawls, disappears under a criticism that is all-comprehending and all-surveying."

"There is just now a great clamor and demand for "culture;" but it is not so much culture that is needed as discipline."

"Total depravity means the entire absence of holiness, not the highest intensity of sin. A totally depraved man is not as bad as he can be, but he has no holiness, that is, no supreme love of God."