The little basket of five loaves and two fish, carried up among the hills furnished, beneath the hand of Christ, an ample feast. And no less a marvel does God work with all the pure in heart who go up into the lonely place to meet with him. Be they only not quite empty of truth and love; let them have but the poorest pilgrim's unleavened cake of sincerity and faith; and when they have spread their insufficiency before God, and broken it into its worthlessness for his blessing to enter, they shall return richer than they came and gather more than they had brought. The rules of quantity, the laws of weight and measure, do not hold beyond the outward world; they disappear wherever the Holy Spirit claims its own.

The smallest spiritual store, taken into the most retired spot, has a self-multiplying power; and if only used with holy trust, will pass the dimensions of nature and reveal the resources of the infinite. The great Creative Spirit is ever ready to touch the merest grain of manna in the heart, and make it numerous to shine on all the ground.  When he flings a handful of moral endowments into the furrows of our nature, He never withholds the mellowing winds and dews; and the germs will not perish unless we deny them root.

Within the smallest genuine grace he has wrapped up boundless possibilities; and whoever will but believe in it and apply it faithfully shall never fail of more.

There is no one so miscreated or misplaced as to have within him no germs of good, from which a fruitful circle may be spread.

If you will but find God's living gift within you, and simply trust it when it presses into growth, there is not a waste place of your nature that shall not become habitable, and even glorious with a wild beauty.

Whatever you may doubt, there is something which you deem true; however much is common and unclean, you have gleams of what is surely holy; wherever you are weak, there is some matter on which your secret eye is clear, and your foot is firm. Here then is the ground on which your moral life is to be raised.

 James Martineau.