"The Trials and Difficulties of the Christian Ministry"

"Our Lord's illustration of the necessity of a previous counting of the cost in important undertakings forcibly applies to the Christian Ministry. . . . Indeed the difficulties of this work to the considerate conscientious mind must exclude any expectation of temporal ease and comfort. Many other tracks in life offer a large promise of indulgence. But to this work is most especially linked the daily cross: and in it must be anticipated severe and sometimes overwhelming trials--arising from the professing church, the world, the power of Satan, and ourselves."

--The Christian Ministry by Charles Bridges, pp. 11-12

We are dwarfs--grateful for giants of antiquity.

"We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treaties written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it were, from death to renewed life."

--Theology of the Reformers by Timothy George, quoting the medieval theologian Peter of Blois.