William Barclay

William Barclay (December 5, 1907 – January 24, 1978) was an Scottish author, radio and television presenter, Church of Scotland minister and Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow.

Quotes

The Gospel of John (1955)

• Jesus teaches that human need must always be helped; that there is no greater task than to relieve someone's pain and distress and that the Christian's compassion must be like God's—unceasing. Other work may be laid aside but the work of compassion never.
  • Vol. 1 (Revised edition. Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1975), p. 183

• (a) To be spiritually dead is to have stopped trying. It is to have come to look on all faults as ineradicable and all virtues as unattainable.[…]

  (b) To be spiritually dead is to have stopped feeling.[…] When compassion goes the heart is dead.

  (c) To be spiritually dead is to have stopped thinking.[…] The day when the desire to learn leaves us, the day when new truths, new methods, new thought become simply a disturbance with which we cannot be bothered, is the day of our spiritual death.

  (d) To be spiritually dead is to have stopped repenting. The day when a man can sin in peace is the day of his spiritual death.

  • Vol. 1 (Revised edition. Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1975), p. 192

• All life is based on the fact that anything worth getting is hard to get. There is a price to be paid for anything. Scholarship can only be bought at the price of study, skill of craft or technique can only be bought at the price of practice, and eminence in any sport can only be bought at the price of training and discipline.
  • Vol. 2 (1964), p. 77

The Plain Man's Guide to Ethics (1973)

The Plain Man's Guide to Ethics: Thoughts on the Ten Commandments. London: Collins (Fontana Books), 1973

• It is only by refusing to accept the situation that in the end we can change the situation.
  • Ch. 7, p. 89

• Any creed or ideology or religion must be known and tested by its fruits, and its fruits are people.
  • Ch. 7, p. 92

• When two people speak about a trial marriage, in which they live together without being married, they are not really reproducing the conditions of marriage, for they are not in a binding situation, which is the very essence of marriage, but in a quite impermanent situation out of which either may walk at any time. They are in a situation in which at any moment they can freely walk out of their problems instead of a situation in which they have to solve their problems, or wreck the situation. The whole point about marriage is that marriage can never be an experiment; it has to be a commitment; no one can experiment with a commitment; a commitment has to be accepted or refused.
  • Ch. 8, p. 149