THE COMPLETE

GATHERED GOLD

A treasury of quotations for Christians

John Blanchard

EVANGELICAL PRESS

Faverdale North, Darlington, DL3 0PH, England

e-mail: sales@evangelicalpress.org

Evangelical Press USA

P. O. Box 825, Webster, New York 14580, USA

e-mail: usa.sales@evangelicalpress.org

web: http://www.evangelicalpress.org

© Evangelical Press 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Complete Gathered Gold—first published 2006

ISBN 0 85234 644 1

Gathered Gold—first published 1984

ISBN 0 85234 186 5 (paperback)

ISBN 0 85234 197 0 (hardback)

More Gathered Gold—first published 1986

ISBN 0 85234 218 7 (hardback)

ISBN 0 85234 219 5 (paperback)

Sifted Silver—first published 1995

ISBN 0 85234 334 5

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

Gratefully dedicated to

HG and the mighty M

Introduction

Ever since I became a Christian I have had a trawling eye and an insatiable appetite to hoard pithy statements that summarized important truths or expressed valuable insights in memorable ways. I soon began to arrange my growing collection into an indexed system, where they were joined by hundreds of other statements I read or heard as the years went by.

Some time later I toyed with the idea that at some point I might gather all of them into a published anthology in order to share my treasures with others. In 1978 I came across The Golden Treasury of Puritan Quotations, compiled by my good friend Dr I. D. E. Thomas, a Welsh preacher living in California, and he graciously invited me to make as much use as I wished of his material. Shortly afterwards I was given a time-worn copy of The Puritan Remembrancer, edited by The Rev. H. J. Horn and by then out of print for over half a century. I was already hugely indebted to the Puritans and fascinated by the works of people like Thomas Brooks, John Flavel, William Secker, John Trapp and Thomas Watson, with their agile army of aphorisms. These men were spiritual giants and we can still benefit from their wit and wisdom today. Browsing through its tiny, packed pages was like discovering a private gold-mine and this was the final spur I needed to press ahead with the publication of my now greatly augmented collection.

In 1984 this resulted in Evangelical Press publishing a selection of 5,000 quotations under the title Gathered Gold and this was so enthusiastically received that it was joined two years later by another 5,000 items (inventively entitled More Gathered Gold)! This was meant to mark the end of the story, but two things changed the plot. Firstly, both volumes continued to be widely used in many countries around the world; and secondly, hundreds of further quotations were finding their way into my filing system every year. As a result, a third volume of 5,000 entries, entitled Sifted ...