Parables of the Cross

By I. Lilias Trotter

Isabella Lilias Trotter (1853-1928) was an artist and a missionary for over 38 years to the Muslims of Algeria. John Ruskin, the famous art critic, didn't believe that ladies could paint before he met Lilias. He changed his mind after he met her and believed that if she would give her life to painting she could become the greatest painter of the nineteenth century. Ruskin believed that if she would devote herself to art "she would be the greatest living painter and do things that would be immortal. " He was unhappy that she was spending so much time on the streets of London, helping with the YWCA, when he thought she ought to be painting. Lilias, however, decided to give up her career in art in order to serve God. She always remained a good friend of Ruskin's though, and they wrote many letters when she was in Algeria. She also wrote several books - beautifully illustrated by herself, including: Parables of the Cross (1894), Parables of the Christ-Life (1899), and a book for Sufi Muslims, The Way of the Sevenfold Secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Release date: Mar 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781625589057

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Parables of the Cross

By I. Lilias Trotter

Start Publishing LLC

Copyright © 2012 by Start Publishing LLC

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

First Start Publishing eBook edition October 2012

Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

Manufactured in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-1-62558-905-7

Death is the Gate of Life

There was deep insight in those old words. For man’s natural thought of death is that of a dreary ending in decay and dissolution. And from his standpoint he is right: death as the punishment of sin is an ending.

But far other is God’s thought in the redemption of the world. He takes the very thing that came in with the curse, and makes it the path of glory. Death becomes a beginning instead of an ending, for it becomes the means of liberating a fresh life.

And so the hope that lies in these parable lessons of death and life is meant for those only who are turning to Him for redemption. To those who have not turned, death stands in all its old awful doom, inevitable, irrevocable. There is no gleam of light through it for them.

The death of the Cross—death’s triumph hour—that was the point where God’s gate opened; and to that gate we come again and again, as our lives unfold, and through it pass even on earth to our joyful resurrection, to a life each time more abundant, for each time the dying is a deeper dying. The Christian life is a process of deliverance out of one world into another, and death, as has been truly said, is the only way out of any world in which we are.

Death is the gate of life. Does it look so to us? Have we learnt to go down, once and again, into its gathering shadows in quietness and confidence, knowing that there is always a better resurrection beyond?

It is in the stages of a