If your knowledge teaches you not to rise above human weakness and misery and lead your fellow man on the right path, you are indeed a man of little worth and will remain such till Judgment Day.

A growing church sees that the work of the ministry should be done by all

In the United States, there are 1,600 forced resignations of pastors every month. Many

There still can be help and hope after a point of crisis, and we must never forget that. The church is supposed to be a redeeming community, in which every member is on one rung of the recovery ladder, reaching down to the person on the rung below and helping them rise above their circumstances and addictions. This cannot happen unless there is honesty-about ourselves and with each other.

Yet the Church does not exist for the infirmary; the infirmary exists for the Church. The

My grandmother had a motto that you should never look down on people unless you are helping them up, and I think that's a very spiritual way of living.

Strength and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

village, and it was a long time before I heard the last of it. Boys enjoy the misery of their companions, at least village boys in that day did, and in later life I have found that all adults are not free from the peculiarity.

This is the shade of meaning: the door of a physician should never be closed; the door of a priest should always be open.

Is it not when the fall is the lowest that charity ought to be the greatest?

I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.

there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, Les Miserables; whose fault is it? And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest?