Texts worth returning to.
A short devotional reading of the Song of Songs by the founder of the China Inland Mission, tracing six movements of the soul’s life with Christ — surrender, drift, restoration, and at last a communion that no longer breaks. Offered in full, with each section followed by its Scripture passage as Taylor arranged it, marking who speaks throughout.
Read the book →Eighty-six sermons preached to the monks of Clairvaux across more than twenty years. The most sustained meditation on divine love in the Western tradition — tender, rigorous, and luminous throughout. Bernard never reaches chapter 3.
Browse collection →Sixty-three sermons on the Song of Songs, complete and gathered by chapter. Spurgeon returned to this book more often, and more tenderly, than to almost any other — reading it as a love-song between Christ and his people, and tracing that love through every season the soul knows: nearness and absence, longing and rest, the dark night and the breaking day. Each sermon is freely available to download.
Browse collection →Preached at Oxford in 1941, this is Lewis at his most searching on desire, glory, and what we were actually made for — “we are far too easily pleased.” Still in copyright, so it isn’t reproduced here; the essay is widely available in print, and the C.S. Lewis Institute’s companion piece below is a good way in.
Read about the sermon →