* "A little philosophy inclineth a man�s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men�s minds about to religion."

"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds."

"They that deny a God destroy man�s nobility; for certainly if man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature."

"All rising to great place is by a winding stair" (Bacon, Of Great Place).

"A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green" (Bacon, Of Revenge).

"Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider" (Bacon, Of Studies).

"The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature" (Bacon, Of Truth).

"Be so true to thyself as thou be not false to others"(Bacon, Of Wisdom for a Man�s Self).

"Knowledge itself is power."

* "The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will b at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. �Imperishable monuments� and �immortal deeds,� death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as if they had never been. Nor will anything that is, be better or worse for all that labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless ages to effect.� . . . This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood" (A.J. Balfour, quoted in William James, Pragmatism, 50).

"Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? God made me to know, love, and serve him in this world and to be happy with him in the next."

"To a woman there is something indescribably inviting in a man whom other women favor."

"Men are like that�they can resist sound argument and yield to a glance."

Scaffolding falls about one daily, one�s old friends and one�s new friends are killed or disappear like flies; the floor of life seems to have gone, and one seems to live in a permanent eclipse and a seasonless world�a world with no summer and no winter, only a long, gray, neutral-tinted Limbo.

"The Holy Ghost intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

"Genuine faith is a void, an obeisance before that which we can never be, or do, or possess."

"There is no way from us to God�not even a via negativa�not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way�even of this way�would not be God" (The Word of God and the Word of Man).

"In order to construct an adequate defense against Feuerbach, one would have to be sure along the whole line the relation to God is one that is in principle uninvertible: actually, however, German theology itself has not been sure of this, since it has for century after century defended itself against the Calvinist corrective. Toward this end, German theology through Schleiermacher adopted precisely the most inept elements of the Reformed school. . . . [S]o long as the relation to God is not unconditionally inconvertible for us, and does not remain so under all circumstances, we shall have no rest in this matter" (Intro to Ess of Christianity xxii, xxiv).

"We may ask: could the church, earlier than Marx, have said and shown in her practice, that the very knowledge of God inherently and powerfully involves and engenders a liberation from all hypostases and idols? If she had seen and proclaimed this before the children of the world did, would she, in face of those errors about self-redemption, have had the authority to prove that self-knowledge untouched by the knowledge of God is never true liberation but rather that it creates only new ideologies and new idols?"

"The church will recover from the sting of Feuerbach�s question only when her worship is fundamentally separated from the worship of old and new hypostases and ideologies. Only then will men again accept the church�s word that her God is not merely an illusion" (xxvii).

"In fact, anyone who knew that we men are evil from head to foot and anyone who reflected that we must die, would recognize it to be the most illusory of all illusions to suppose that the essence of God is the essence of man. He certainly would not disturb �the good Lord� by such a confusion of Him with the likes of us, even if he thought Him to be a dream. The not-knowing and mis-knowing in Feuerbach are closely related" (xxviii).

"if I am always the real man, the burden of whose existence as a solitary individual no human Thou can relieve, and on the contrary, upon whom this burden is laid by the inexorably-present human Thou, . . . the identification of man with God is impossible"

"Are we willing to admit that even in our relation to God, we are and remain liars, and that we can only lay claim to His truth, His certainty, His salvation as grace and only as grace? Then we know what we are doing when, in contrast to Feuerbach, we remember evil and death. . . . So long as this nail is not firmly in, so long as the talk about �God in man� is not cut out at the roots, we have no cause to criticize Feuerbach, but are with him �the true children of his century�" (xxx).

"[Barth] argued that only when we recognize the incompleteness, triviality, anxiety, and transitoriness of life can we even begin to understand the message of the gospel�a gospel that does not have to do with the salutary effects of religious belief or experience but with the "qualitative distinction" between God and the world, which is to say, with the "fact" that human beings live in an ambiguous and transitory world surrounded by an unfathomable mystery that they are always trying to understand and domesticate.

Religion, Barth claimed, is the primary human means of that domestication. . . . Indeed, since sin is the attempt to abrogate the distance between time and eternity, and since religion (law) is the human embodiment of this attempt, it follows that religion is the principal locus of sin. And it is in religion that human beings attempt to deny and conceal the ambiguity of their existence.

Revelation, in this view, is not the abolition of the ambiguity of life; nor is it the communication of propositions that, when believed, are saving truths. It is, rather, the full disclosure of this ambiguity, this chasm between time and eternity. Revelation is what Barth termed "the Krisis" (judgment), in which all human pretensions are called into question: "Genuine faith is a void, an obeisance before that which we can never be, or do, or possess." Faith, according to Barth, is knowing that one does not know. . . . the utter dissolution of man and all of the possibilities in which he takes pride. . . . The revelation, for example, can be found in the law, which condemns unrighteousness, or in a cry of complete despair, or by a calm, unprejudiced religious contemplation of the triviality of human life, which is to say, that man is not God.

Grace, in Barth�s view, does not bridge the gulf between God and men, but exposes it, and the exposure is such that men are able to accept God as the one they do not know.

. . . what Jesus revealed is simply what the law and the prophets also revealed�namely, the pretensions of human pride and the unknowability of God. If one asks, as Paul [in Romans] did, What advantage then is the law and religion? the answer is that religion forces human beings to see that they cannot complete existence for themselves. Religion keeps alive the question of whether there is meaning in life. Jesus is not to be regarded as some supernatural event that visibly disrupts the causal nexus. He is not a religious genius, a new law giver, an inspired prophet, or a superman. His significance does not lie in his ethics or his teaching. It lies, rather, in his identification with human despair and his giving up all claims to be a religious hero or genius. . . .

Barth did not interpret the Resurrection as a supernatural reversal of a tragic course of events, one event among other events, but as the symbol for the nonhistorical relation of the whole life of Jesus to God. Faith in the Resurrection, then, does not consist in believing in events that are dubious by our normal canons of reasoning. Rather, it is the identification with the crucified one, which is to say, it is the embracing of the ambiguity of existence with him. (xviii).

. . . the point he is making is this: the way to a genuine and nonidolatrous affirmation of human life is through the way of negation, through the crucifixion of the self. . . . it is only when man despairs of being able to complete his own tower of Babel that �he has his hands free for joining in the work of building all the smaller towers of the earthly city, which is dear to him in all its transitory nature, in its relativity and limitations, because it points to the entirely different heavenly city for which he is waiting. He no longer seeks to make the titanic stride of educating man into a superman, or even into a noble person; therefore he may and can rejoice in the many thousand steps that must be made on earth in the present. . .

. . . not only [is] faith compatible with radical intellectual doubt, but it necessarily implies a recognition of the partial and ambiguous character of any claim to truth, especially any religious claim. . . . knowledge is historically conditioned . . . . [so] the morality of knowledge is not the antithesis to faith but its expression.

"The main goal of divine Providence in [allowing] the discovery of these tribes and lands . . . is . . . the conversion and well-being of souls, and to this goal everything temporal must necessarily be subordinated and directed (Historia de las Indias).

"If we turn away from evil out of fear of punishment, we are in the position of slaves. If we pursue the enticement of wages, . . . we resemble mercenaries. Finally if we obey for the sake of the good itself and out of love from him who commands . . . we are in the position of children" (CCC 1828).

"If there is a God, then He is the Devil" (Schaeffer 296).

�All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation� (A Very Easy Death).

"Compassion will cure more sins that condemnation."

"Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends."

Belloc on Chesterton: 'He made men see what they had not seen before. He made them know. He was an architect of certitude, whenever he practised the art at which he excelled. His unique, his capital genius for illustration by parallel, by example, is his peculiar mark... No one whatsoever that I can recall in the whole course of English letters has his amazing, I would say almost superhuman, capacity for parallelism. Parallelism consists in the illustration of some unperceived truth by its exact consonance with the reflection of a truth already known and perceived... Always, in whatever manner he launched the parallelism, he produced the shock of illumination. He taught. Parallelism was so native to his mind; it was so naturally a fruit of his mental character that he had difficulty in understanding why others did not use it with the same lavish facility as himself'. On the Place of Chesterton in English Letters, London 1940, pp.36-41.

"The greatest happiness for the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation."

"I write in response to an inner voice which commands me to transmit my mental experience. Writing is no luxury for me, but a means of survival, an almost physiological necessity."

"I became a Christian because I was seeking for a deeper and truer foundation for belief in man" (180).

"Reality is, in fact, closed to those who pretend to know in a state of indifference, disinterestedness, and neutrality, for they suppress the evidence of the very reality they attempt to know" (89).

"Every human society has its own corpus of officially credited wisdom, the beliefs and values that most people take as self-evidentially true" (in McGrath 67).

"We have first raised a dust and then complain that we cannot see."

"Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few."

"since God has endowed us, as members of the human race with intelligence, we are under an obligation to use this gift" (in McGrath 167).

"Great is Truth, and mighty above all things" (1 Esdras 4:41).

"For the world has lost its youth, and the times begin to wax old" (2 Esdras 14:10).

"Open not thine heart to every man" (Ecclesiasticus 8:19).

"The number of fools cannot be counted" (Ecclus 1:15).

"A man�s clothes and the way he laughs and his gait reveal his character" (Ecclus 19:30).

"Wine . . . was made to make men glad" (Ecclesiasticus 31:27).

"My son, if you aspire to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for an ordeal" (2:1).

"Fight to the death for truth, and the Lord God will war on your side" (4:33).

"And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Cor 15:14-20).

"I will open Africa to the Gospel or die trying."

"Freedom is the ability to define oneself with one�s possibilities held back not by the power of other people over one but only by one�s relationship to God and to natural surroundings" (108).

William Blake

"A truth that�s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent."

"Everything that lives,/ Lives not alone, or for itself"

"Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Mock on, mock on, �tis all is vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again" (Blake).

"I was angry with my friend
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow" (Blake, "The Poison Tree").

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time" (Blake, Proverbs of Hell).

�He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence� (Blake, Proverbs of Hell).

�The busy bee has no time for sorrow� (Blake, Proverbs of Hell).

�The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom� (Blake, Proverbs of Hell).
�Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity� (Blake, Proverbs of Hell).
�No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings� (Blake, Proverbs of Hell).

�Prayers plow not! Praises reap not!� (Blake, Proverbs of Hell).
�Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!� (Blake, Proverbs of Hell).

�Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires� (Blake, Proverbs of Hell).

"It would be difficult to make a revolution without the Bible" (Boff Introducing 34).

"We have to work our way into a more biblical framework of reference, where �knowing� implies loving, letting oneself become involved body and soul, communing wholly�being committed, in a word" (Boff Introducing 9).

"Faith, in its original sense, is a mode of being through which a human being lives and interprets experience in the light of a supreme Meaning. Religions know this meaning as God; Christianity recognizes it as God incarnate in the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. . . . Faith defines our transcendent dimension . . . precisely our dimension as human beings�with the power to overcome all taboos and move beyond all historical determinants by exercising our freedom and transcendence" (Boff Faith 37).

"That Bible on the table is a book to you. It is far more than a book to me. It speaks to me; it is as if it were a person."

"Honesty demands that we recognize that we live in a world as if there were no God. And this is just what we do recognize�before God! God himself drives us to this realization. God makes us know that we must live as men who can get along without Him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mk. 15:34)! We stand continually in the presence of the God who makes us live in the world without the God-hypothesis" (Letters and Papers, p.188).

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. . . .

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. . . . Let him be comforted and rest assured in his possession of this grace�for grace alone does everything. Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace! This is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all he has. . . . Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: �ye were bought at a price,� and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life . . .

[God] showed [Luther] through the Scriptures that the following of Christ is not the achievement or merit of a select few, but the divine command to all Christians without distinction. Monasticism had transformed the humble work of discipleship into the meritorious activity of the saints and the self-renunciation of discipleship into the flagrant self-assertion of the �religious.� The world had crept into the very heart of the monastic life, and was once more making havoc. . . . Luther�s return from the cloister to the world was the worst blow the world had suffered since the days of early Christianity. The renunciation he made when he became a monk was child�s play compared with that which he had to make when he returned to the world. Now came the frontal assault. The only way to follow Jesus was by living in the world. Hitherto the Christian life had been the achievement of a few choice spirits under the exceptionally favorable conditions of monasticism; now it is a duty laid on every Christian living in the world. . . .

It is a fatal misunderstanding of Luther�s action to suppose that the rediscovery of the gospel of pure grace offered a general dispensation from obedience to the command of Jesus, or that it was the discovery of the Reformation that God�s forgiving grace automatically conferred upon the world both righteousness and holiness. . . . It was not the justification of sin, but the justification of the sinner that drove Luther from the cloister back into the world. The grace he had received was costly grace. It was grace, for it as like water on parched ground, comfort in tribulation, freedom from the bondage of a self-chosen way, and forgiveness of all his sins. And it was costly, for, so far from dispensing him from good works, it meant that he must take the call to discipleship more seriously than ever before. It was grace because it cost so much, and it cost so much because it was grace. That was the secret of the gospel of the Reformation�the justification of the sinner.

Yet the outcome of the Reformation was the victory, not of Luther�s perception of grace in all its purity and costliness, but of the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace Is to be obtained at the cheapest price. All that was needed was a subtle and almost imperceptible change of emphasis, and the damage was done. . . . When he spoke of grace, Luther always implied as a corollary that it cost him his own life, the life which was now for the first time subjected to the absolute obedience of Christ. Only so could he speak of grace. Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for word. But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation of discipleship. . . . The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world. Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship" (45-53).

"By laying hold of God�s forgiveness, he made the final, radical renunciation of a self-willed life, and this breach was such that it led inevitably to a serious following of Christ. . . . The only man who has a right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. Such a man knows that discipleship I a gift of grace, and the call is inseparable from the grace. But those who try to use this grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves (54-55).

"But do we realize that this cheap grace has turned back upon us like a boomerang? . . . Instead of opening up the way to Christ, it has hardened us in our disobedience. . . . The only effect that such a word could have on us was to bar our way to progress, and seduce us to the mediocre level of the world, quenching the joy of discipleship by telling us that we were following a way of our own choosing, that we were spending our strength and disciplining ourselves in vain. . . .

* The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works. . . .

Happy are they who, knowing that grace, can live in the world without being of it, who by following Jesus Christ, are so assured of their heavenly citizenship that they are truly free to live their lives in the world. Happy are they who know that discipleship simply means the life which springs from grace, that that grace simply means discipleship" (58-60).

"[Christ�s] word is not an abstract doctrine, but the re-creation of the whole life of man. . . . there is only one way of believing on Jesus Christ and that is by leaving all and going with the incarnate Son of God" (67).

"only he who believes is obedient; only he who is obedient believes. . . . For faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience. Since, then, we cannot adequately speak of obedience as the consequence of faith, and since we must never forget the indissoluble unity of the two, we must place the [propositions together]" (69).

"As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death�we give ourselves over to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a an, he bids him come and die. . . . because only the man who is dead to his own will can follow Christ. In fact every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts. The call to discipleship, the baptism in the name of Jesus, means both death and life" (99).

"The yoke and burden of Christ are his cross. To go one�s way under the sign of the cross is not misery and desperation, but peace and refreshment for the soul, it is the highest joy. Then we do not walk under our self-made laws and burdens, but under the yoke of him who knows us and who walks under the yoke with us. Under his yoke we are certain of his nearness and his communion" (103).

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

My secret to happiness: "I never said no to the Lord."

"You know what�s wrong with you, miss, whoever you are? You�re chicken. You got no guts. You�re afraid to stick out your chin and say, "Okay life�s a fact. People do fall in love. People do belong to each other. Because that�s the only chance anybody�s got for real happiness. You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing. You�re terrified somebody�s going to stick you in a cage, but baby, you�re already in that cage. You built it yourself, and its not bounded on the west by Tulip, Texas, or on the east by Somalialand. It�s wherever you go�because no matter where you go, you just end up running into yourself."

"Each [Apostle] went [abroad] as a lover to his betrothed on his appointed errand. It was all instinctive and natural. They were equally controlled by the common vision, but they had severally personal visions which drew them whither they were needed. In the first days of Christianity, there is an absence of the calculating spirit...[which is] death to faith."

"Conventiality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack he first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns" (Jane Eyre).

"Happiness is the natural flower of duty."

"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle."

"I walked a mile with pleasure�

She chattered all the way

But left me none the wiser

For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow

And ne�er a word said she,

But oh the things I learned from her

When Sorrow walked with me."

"Ignorance is not innocence but sin."

Emil Brunner

"The Bible contains a lot of statements of fact, of ethics, and of doctrine, that are in contradiction to knowledge we have otherwise gained. There can be no harmony of the Gospels. That is bunk, dishonesty" (in Schaeffer, Complete Works, Vol 2, p.128).

"This overemphasis upon the intellectual aspect of the Faith came out in two facts�both of them well-known, but, as it seems to me�never fully understood. The first of these facts was the equation of the �Word� of the Bible with the �Word of God�; this produced a doctrine of Verbal Inspiration, with all its disastrous results" (in Schaeffer, Complete Works, Vol 2, p.128).

"In the thought of Calvin a tendency to take a rigidly literal view of the Bible, which developed into the doctrine of Verbal Inspiration, comes out in the fact that Revelation and Scripture are regarded as identical" (in Schaeffer, Complete Works, Vol 2, p.128).

"I await death and I await it with impatience. It has always been the object of my prayers. It forms today the most precious reward of my labors and my sufferings" (Ellsberg 61).

I am morally nothing without the Lord. I have really not one true thought or good feeling, and can do no good works; without Him. I cannot drive away from me any sinful thought, any passionate feeling such as malice, envy, fornication, pride, etc. The Lord is the accomplishment of everything good that I think, feel, and do. O, how boundlessly wide is the Lord�s grace acting in me! The Lord is everything to me, and so clearly, so constantly. Mine � is only my sinfulness; mine�are only mine infirmities. O, how we ought to love our Lord, Who was pleased to call us into existence from non-existence, to honour us by His image and likeness, to establish us in a paradise of delights, to subdue, all the earth unto us, and Who � when we did not keep His commandments, but were allured by the enticement of the Devil, and immeasurable offended our Creator by our ingratitude, and assimilated unto ourselves all the qualities of the tempter (pride, malice, envy, ingratitude) and all his evil arts, which he taught us as his prisoners � did not reject us for ever, but deigned to redeem us from sin, from the curse and death into which we had fallen through sin, and Himself appeared upon earth, having taken our nature upon Him; He Himself became my Teacher, my Healer, my Worker of miracles, my Saviour; He Himself bore the punishment for us, died for us in order that we should not be eternally lost. He rose from the dead, in order to raise us too after death. He ascended into heaven, in order that we, too, should ascend, we who had fallen so low through sin; and He became everything to us � food, drink, light, purification, health � and the power that protects, saves, preserves, and has mercy upon us (My Life In Christ, Third Edition).

"The church rests on its faith that the Christ has come, and that this is the redemption which God has bestowed on mankind. We, Israel, are not able to believe this. . . . We know more deeply, more truly, that world history has not been turned upside down to its very foundations�that the world is not redeemed. We sense its unredeemedness" (in Yancey).

"what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we really and fully are�even if we tell it only to ourselves�because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being human is all about. Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell" (2-3).

"In fact I am inclined to believe that God�s chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn�t play those roles right the first time around, we can still have another go at it now" (32).

"Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits" (35).

"We believe in God�such as it is, we have faith�because certain things happened to us once and go on happening. We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if our faith is not mainly just window dressing or a rabbit�s foot or fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of rich human compost. The God of Biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don�t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God too. . . . there is nothing more important than to pay attention to what is happening to us" (Telling Secrets 35-36).

"Since the meaning of life is to be found not in pleasure but in spiritual goods, the inner life of man and of human society is a constant struggle between spirit and sensuality for domination" (33 Bulgakov Anthology).

"We know that there may be people who do not know Christ but who serve him and do his will, and that those who call themselves Christians may in truth be alien to him" (57).

"The absence of any external, infallible authority in matters of doctrine, together with the possibility of relatively infallible definitions by ecclesiastical authority, expressing the catholic mind of the Church�this is the palladium of Orthodox liberty" (129).

"I was twenty-four years old. For a decade I had lived without faith and, after early stormy doubts, a religious emptiness reigned in my soul. One evening we were driving across the southern steppes of Russia, and the strong-scented spring grass was gilded by the rays of a glorious sunset. Far in the distance I saw the blue outlines of the Caucasus. This was my first sight of the mountains. I looked with ecstatic delight at their rising slopes. I drank in the light and the air of the steppes. I listened to the revelation of nature. My soul was accustomed to the dull pain of seeing nature as a lifeless desert and of treating its surface beauty as a deceptive mask. Yet, contrary to my intellectual convictions, I could not be reconciled to nature without God.

Suddenly, in that evening hour, my soul was joyfully stirred. I started to wonder what would happen if the cosmos were not a desert and its beauty not a mask or a deception�if nature were not death, but life. If he existed, the merciful and loving Father, if nature was the vesture of his love and glory, and if the pious feelings of my childhood, when I used to live in his presence, when I loved him and trembled because I was weak, were true, then the tears and inspiration of my adolescence, the sweetness of my prayers, my innocence and all those emotions which I had rejected and trodden down would be vindicated, and my present outlook with its emptiness and deadness would appear nothing more than blindness and lies, and what a transformation it would bring to me!" (10-11).

"My revolt against my [Seminary] surroundings was morally right in so far as it was inspired by love of freedom and disgust at the servility which then reigned in the clerical world (and at that time it was the only world I knew). I did not want to be reconciled to it, indeed I could not be, and it would not have been right. I fled from it to save my spiritual integrity, and to this day I consider my flight justified" (3-4).

"If the bones of the dead Jesus were discovered tomorrow in a tomb in Palestine, all the essentials of Christianity would remain unchanged"

"Genuine freedom is not subjective arbitrariness, but freedom from the motivation of the moment. . . . Freedom is obedience to a law of which the validity is recognized and accepted, which man recognizes as the law of his own being (Zacharias 150).

About: "Radical demythologization is the parallel to the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of justification apart from works of the law by faith alone. Or rather, it is its consistent application in the sphere of knowledge. Just as the doctrine of justification, it destroys all man�s false security and all false longing for security, whether that security be rests on his good behavior or on his validating knowledge. The man who will believe in God as his God must know that he has nothing in his hand in which he might believe, that he is, as it were, up in the air, and can demand no proof for the truth of the word addressing him. Only he finds security who lets all security go, who�to speak with Luther�is prepared to go into the inner darkness" (Stuhlmacher 64).

"man�s knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone to seriously hold the New Testament view of the world" (Blomberg).

[According to Bultmann,] the intention of the Biblical writers is not to win assent to certain objective doctrines but to bring man to an authentic self-understanding, to a radical faith. The New Testament writers were primarily concerned to confront man with the self-destructiveness of trying to secure his existence on his own terms (to justify himself) and to proclaim to him the possibility of a new mode of existence (faith), an existence in which he finds his security in the unseen, in God. Faith, in short, is an existentiell self-understanding and, therefore, something quite different from holding certain objective beliefs to be true. It is a proclamation which . . . precipitates a decision, holding as it does before men�s eyes the two possibilities of faith and unfaith, authentic and unauthentic existence. . . . [T]he proclamation is that . . . one must identify his own life with Christ, must die to himself, if he would experience new life. . . . the christology of Paul and John does not consist in a theory about Christ�s divine nature but in a proclamation concerning the significance of his death for the believer. . . . Paul�s doctrine of justification (his view that man can only experience new life when he gives up trying to justify himself) could be said to be his real christology, that to know Christ is to know his benefits. Christology is not a speculative belief concerning Christ�s divine nature but the articulation of a new understanding of existence. One does not first believe that Jesus was divine and experience a liberation of the self; rather, by grasping the significance of the event one experience a liberation of the self and calls Christ divine. . . . [M]an is the kind of being that can win or lose himself. He must choose to become fully human, and he can do this only when he ceases to live anxiously in an attempt to secure his life on his own terms and opens himself up to the possibilities of the present and the future (141). . . . [M]an can achieve authenticity only by resolution and decision . . . [F]aith is no mysterious supernatural quality but simply the fulfillment of true human nature. It is a possibility that belongs to a man as man, a possibility for which he is accountable if he forfeits it. So also, love is not "some mysterious supernatural power, but is man�s �natural� mode of relationship. . . . [T]hrough the appearance of Jesus, the world and man are brought into a new situation and thus are called to a decision for or against the world. . . . [T]he Revelation is represented as the shattering and negating of all human self-assertion and all human norms and evaluations, And, precisely by being such negation, the Revelation is the affirmation and fulfillment of human longing for life, for true reality. . . . To believe in the cross is to be crucified with Christ and to believe in the resurrection is to experience new life. . . .

"There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue."

"Falsehood has a perennial spring."

"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

"Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition."

"Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed."

"Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist."

"People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."

"Man is by his constitution a religious animal."

"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."

"Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference, which is, at least, half infidelity."

"To innovate is not to reform."

"Probable evidence , in its very nature, affords but an imperfect kind of information; and is to be considered as relative only to beings of limited capacities. For nothing which is the possible object of knowledge, whether past, present, or future, can be probable to an infinite Intelligence; since it cannot but be discerned absolutely as it is in itself, certainly true or certainly false. But to us, probability is the very guide of life" (Butler, Analogy 2).

[to John Wesley]: "Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing."

* "As I design the search after truth as the business of my life, I shall not be ashamed to learn from any person" (Bishop Butler, Analogy xi).

"The design of this treatise is not to vindicate the character of God, but to show the obligations of men; it is not to justify his providence, but to show what belongs to us to do" (274).

"But the general obligations of religion are fully made out, by proving the reasonableness of the practice of it. And that the practice of religion is reasonable, may be shown, though no more could be proved, than that the system of it may be so, for aught we know to the contrary" (Bishop Butler, Analogy 246).

* "The evidence of religion, then, being admitted real, those who object against it as not satisfactory, i.e., as not being what they wish it, plainly forget the very condition of our being: for satisfaction, in this sense, does not belong to such a creature as man. And, which is more material, they forget also the very nature of religion. For religion presupposes, in all those who will embrace it, a certain degree of integrity and honesty; which it was intended to try whether men have or not, and to exercise in such as have it, in order to its improvement. . . . And therefore the question is not at all, Whether the evidence of religion be satisfactory; but Whether it be, in reason, sufficient to prove and discipline that virtue, which it presupposes" (Bishop Butler, Analogy 247-248).

"those who do not believe will at least be shown the absurdity of all attempts to prove Christianity false" (Butler, Analogy 252).

* "The evidence of religion not appearing obvious, may constitute one particular part of some men�s trial in the religious sense: as it gives scope for a virtuous exercise or vicious neglect of their understanding, in examining or not examining into that evidence. . . . [T]he same character, the same inward principle, which, after a man is convinced of the truth of religion, renders him obedient to the precepts of it, would, were he not thus convinced, set him about an examination of it, upon its system and evidence being offered to his thoughts: and that in the latter state his examination would be with such impartiality, seriousness, and solicitude, proportional to what his obedience is in the former. And as inattention, negligence, want of al l serious concern about a matter of such importance, when offered to men�s consideration, is, before a distinct conviction of its truth, as real immoral depravity and dissoluteness, as neglect of religious practice after such conviction: so active solicitude about it, and fair impartial consideration of its evidence before such conviction, is as really an exercise of a morally right temper; as is religious practice after. Thus, that religion is not intuitively true, but a matter of deduction and inference; that a conviction of its truth is not forced upon every one, but left to be, by some, collected with heedful attention to premises; this as much constitutes religious probation, as much affords sphere, scope, opportunity for right and wrong behavior, as anything whatever does. And their manner of treating this subject when laid before them, shows what is in their heart, and is an exertion of it" (214).

* "For multiple proofs, by being added, not only increase the evidence, but multiply it" (267).

"it is certain, that doubting implies a degree of evidence for that of which we doubt: and that this degree of evidence as really lays us under obligations as demonstrative evidence" (Butler, Analogy 258).

* "[W]ith regard to Christianity . . . there is a middle between a full satisfaction of the truth of it, and a satisfaction of the contrary. The middle state of mind between these two, consists in a serious apprehension, that it may be true, joined with doubt whether it be so. And this, upon the best judgment I am able to make, is as far towards speculative infidelity, as any skeptic can at all be supposed to go, who has had true Christianity, with all the proper evidence of it, laid before him, and has in any tolerable measure considered them. . . [So,] a serious apprehension that Christianity may be true lays persons under the strictest obligations of a serious regard of it, throughout the whole of their life" (Butler, Analogy 258-259).

VISIBLE Church: "As Christianity served these ends and purposes, when it was first published, by the miraculous publication itself, so it was intended to serve the same purposes, in future ages, by means of the settlement of a visible Church; of a society, distinguished from common ones, and from the rest of the world, by peculiar institutions; by an instituted method of instruction, and an instituted form of external religion. . . . To prevent [people�s forgetting Christianity after its miraculous publication] seems to be one reason why a visible Church was instituted: to be, like a city upon a hill, a standing memorial to the world of the duty which we owe our Maker: to call men continually, both by example and instruction, to attend to it" (138).

"They would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced."

"Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;

Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure."

"Be warm, but pure; be amorous, but be chaste."

"In the first place they inquire, by what right the Lord is angry with his creatures who had not provoked him by any previous offense; for that to devote to destruction whom he pleases, is more like the caprice of a tyrant than the lawful sentence of a judge; that men have reason, therefore, to expostulate with God, if they are predestined to eternal death without any demerit of their own, merely by his sovereign will. If such thoughts ever entered the minds of pious men, they will be sufficiently enabled to break their violence by this one consideration, how exceedingly presumptuous it is only to inquire into the causes of Divine will; which is in fact, and is justly entitled to be, the cause of everything that exists. For if it has any cause, then there must be something antecedent, on which it depends; which is impious to suppose. For the will of God is the highest rule of justice; so that what he wills must be considered just, for this very reason, because he wills it. When it is inquired, therefore, why the Lord did so, the answer must be, Because he would. But if you go further and ask why he so determined, you are in search of something higher than the will of God, which can never be found" (Calvin III, 23, 2).

"Read Demosthenes or Cicero; read Plato, Aristotle, or any others of that class; I grant that you will be attracted, delighted, moved, and enraptured by them in a surprising manner; but if, after reading them, you turn to the perusal of the sacred volume, whether you are willing or unwilling, it will affect you so powerfully, it will penetrate your heart, and impress itself so strongly in your mind, that, compared with its energetic influence, the beauties of rhetoricians and philosophers will almost entirely disappear; so that it is easy to perceive something divine in the sacred Scriptures, which far surpasses the highest attainments and ornaments of human industry" (Institutes, I,8,1).

"Truth, ever lovely,�since the world began
The foe of tyrants, and the friend of man."

"It was not strange; for in the human breast
Two master-passions cannot co-exist."

"To lose one�s life is a little thing and I shall have the courage to do so if it is necessary; but to see the meaning of this life dissipated, to see our reason for existing disappear, that is what is unbearable. One cannot live without meaning" (Caligula).

"If God did exist, we should have to abolish him."

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."

"Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God."

"The greatest of faults, I should say, is be conscious of none."

"�Do the duty which lies nearest thee�, which thou knowest to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer" (Carlyle).

�The man who cannot wonder is but a pair of spectacles behind which there is no eye.�

"No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole: can he have followed far
Who has no wound nor scar?"

"Tolerance of everything is the sign of an empty head, not a mark of agape love" (Carnell 85).

"Either God wants to prevent evil, and He cannot do it; or He can do it and does not want to; or He can do it and does not want to; or He neither wishes to nor can do it; or he wishes to and can do it. If he has the desire but not the power, He is impotent; if He can, but has not the desire, He has a malice we cannot attribute to him; if he has neither the power nor the desire, he is both impotent and evil, and consequently not God; if he has the desire and the power, whence then comes evil, or why does He not prevent it?" (Carnell 277).

"If we try to come to the Bible with a principle of selectivity found outside the Bible, we render the Bible needless, since we can accept of it only what coincides with the truth which we had before we ever came to Scripture in the first place. In this case we do not need Holy Writ at all; all we need is the truth and we already have that" (Carnell 198).

"rational probability is the guide of life" (Carnell 113).

"On the contrary it is the finality of Christianity which preserves tolerance for tomorrow. If all truth is relative, then the truth that we should be tolerant is also relative" (Carnell 221).

"If one is to cavil at, and finally, to reject Christianity simply because it contains minor contradictions, he has resorted to the application of a criterion which not only refutes Christianity, against which it is directed, but also succeeds in refuting the basis of the very objection itself. To be significant, the objection must itself be free from difficulties, which, obviously, is impossible. There is no presently known system of philosophy which does not contain, not a few, but many, many minor problems" (Carnell 200).

"God is sovereign and yet man is free. The two are interrelated so magnificently that a cross-section of history at every point reveals both the responsibility of man over against God and the mysterious superintending power of God over against man. Neither cancels out the other. . . . Man stands responsible for his every act, because God, the final Arbiter and Judge in every dispute, declares that he is" (Carnell 314).

"the universe, with all the evil in it, is the best of all worlds, for the very reason that God, the standard of good, has called it good" (Carnell 300).

"Man must fight evil, not because God is frantically in need of his help; rather, because God has graciously permitted him to be an instrument in its extermination. The Christian struggles against evil, therefore, because God, the perfect judge, has commanded him so to act. God has decreed both the end of the evil and the appointed means for bringing about this end. Such means include the moral struggle of the individual and the preaching of the gospel" (Carnell 299).

"If God is not free always to do the whole counsel of His will, something antecedent to God is preventing him from so doing. But anything which is potent enough to be antecedent to God is powerful enough to reduce the later from the status of Almighty to that of a finite Deity" (Carnell 309).

"This conflict is an old story to us by now; it is the finite God, the God that must preserve human values, verses the Almighty that sovereignty rules heaven and earth. Believing that the latter is a sovereign tyrant unworthy of our love, modern man has rejected Jehovah, and in His place, put another God in heaven, one that suits the temper of a scientific age" (Carnell 343).

"Since God is the definition of consistency, for consistency is what He does, it is well to point out that the law of contradiction has final meaning only in relation to God. God is above the law of contradiction in the sense that God is consistent by nature" (Carnell 60).

"The Ten Commandments are good and God�s damning . . . is good, solely and only because God approves of such acts" (Carnell 312).

"Faith can move mountains, but it cannot declare a mountain to be a non-mountain."

"It would be philosophically stupid to jettison Christianity because of [minor] difficult[ies]. A rational man settles for that position which is attended by the fewest difficulties, not one which is unattended by any" (Carnell 111).

"Suppose that Hans Mueller makes a special type of shoe, a shoe with his own unique marks on it; and suppose that one were to come from Mars where shoes are unknown; when he beholds the shoes of Hans Mueller, they will be but an unintelligible datum to him�they may be �African betties� for all he knows. He can see no meaning to what is before him, because he lacks the criterion. In like manner, without the standards of truth, goodness, and beauty in us, it is impossible for us to see truth, goodness, and beauty in the universe. Apart from these criteria we would lack a knowledge of what to look for in a world that has been made by God. Thomas [Aquinas] thought he could demonstrate God�s existence on a tabula rasa epistemology, but we object. Until we first know God within, all appeals to truth, goodness, and symmetry in the universe without, falls on deaf ears. It would be similar to proving to a dog that there is a moral order in the universe. The dog would pay no attention to you because he lacks the condition sin qua non for appreciating it. But is it meaningful to say to a child, "Now, aren�t you sorry? You know you should not have done that!" In like manner it is futile to take a weasel to hear Tschaikowsky�s Fifth Symphony or to teach a horse higher calculus. These animals have the sense perceptions that are needed; they just lack the rationes [innate knowledge of true, good, and beautiful] in the mind with which to make cognitive sense out of their sensations" (170-171).

"Everything�s got a moral, if you can only find it."

�Finding in everything only deception and nothingness, the soul is constrained to have recourse to God himself and be content with him.�

�The best of all for the soul is what God wills at this particular moment, and all else must be regarded by the soul with perfect indifference as being nothing at all.�

�All that happens in the world exists for no other purpose than the good of souls perfectly submissive to the will of God.�

* "Love is the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being" (2392).

* "[We should] use everything that is not God only insofar as it brings us closer to him, and to detach ourselves from it insofar as it turns us away from him" (226).

"Faith in God leads us to turn to him alone as our first origin and our ultimate goal, and neither to prefer anything to him nor to substitute anything for him" (229).

* "[Man is] the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake" (356).

"sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving one another" (387).

"Full right to pass definitive judgment on the works and hearts of men belongs to him as redeemer of the world" (679).

* "Christ will reveal the secret disposition of hearts and will render to each according to his works and according to his acceptance or refusal of grace" (682).

"�The world was created for the sake of the Church� . . . The Church is the goal of all things . . . �Just as God�s will is creation and is called the world, so his intention is the salvation of men, and it is called the Church�" (760).

"For it is through Christ�s Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained [but] . . . �many elements of sanctification and of truth� are found outside the visible confines of the Catholic Church [and] . . . �In every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable� to God" (816, 819, 761).

"Those who through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience�those too may achieve eternal salvation" (847).

"Those who obey the prompting of the Spirit of truth are already on the way of salvation" (851).

"respectful dialogue with those who do not yet accept the gospel. Believers can profit from this dialogue by learning to appreciate better �those elements of truth and grace which are found among peoples, and which are, as it were, a secret presence of God�" (856) for the "Catholic Church recognizes in other religions that search, among shadows and images, for the God who is unknown yet near" (843).

"this communion of life and love with the most holy Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed�is called �heaven.� Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definite happiness" (1024).

"By the action of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit [sacraments] make present efficaciously the grace that they signify" (1084).

"the mystery of Christ . . . must be proclaimed, celebrated, and lived in all cultures in such a way that they themselves are not abolished by it, but redeemed and fulfilled" (1204).

"The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God�s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity. . . . [W]e are called to share in the life of the Blessed Trinity, here on earth in the obscurity of faith, and after death in eternal light" (260, 265).

"The evangelical counsels manifest the living fullness of charity, which is never satisfied with not giving more. . . From the very beginning of the Church there have been men and women who have renounced the great good of marriage to follow the Lamb wherever he goes, to be intent on the things of the Lord, to seek to please him, and to go out to meet the Bridegroom who is coming. Christ himself has invited certain persons to follow him in this way of life . . . Virginity for the sake of the kingdom of heaven is an unfolding of baptismal grace, a powerful sign of the supremacy of the bond with Christ and of the ardent expectation of his return, a sign which also recalls that marriage is a reality of this present age which is passing away. . . . [A]ccepted with a joyous heart, celibacy radiantly proclaims the reign of God" (1974, 1618, 1619, 1579).

"error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith" (2277).

"Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes" (2351).

"human life and the duty of transmitting it are not limited by the horizons of this life only: their true evaluation and full significance can be understood only in reference to man�s eternal destiny" (2371).

"the goods created by God for everyone should in fact reach everyone in accordance with justice and with the help of charity" (2459).

"true happiness is not found in riches or well-being, in human fame or power, or in any human achievement�however beneficial it may be�such as science, technology, and art, or indeed in any creature, but in God alone, the source of every good and of all love" (1723).

"The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to �the slavery of sin�" (1733).

* "A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience" (1790).

"Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God" (1822).

"Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods . . . �an utterance, deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law�" (1849).

"The Beatitudes teach us the final end to which God calls us: the Kingdom, the vision of God, participation in the divine nature, eternal life, filiation, rest in God" (1726).

"�The human person . . . is and ought to be the principle, the subject, and the object of every social organization.� . . . �The order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around�" (1892, 1912).

"The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of spouses and the procreation and education of offspring" (1601). It "stands under the twofold obligation of fidelity and fecundity" (2363). Sexual union is "a sign and a pledge of spiritual communion" (2360) and is not merely physical but "concerns the innermost being of the human person as such" and "is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death" (2361). "A child does not come from the outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment" (2366). Therefore, "each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life" (2366). Since God has established a unity "between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act" (2366), human beings should not separate the two purposes of sexuality by chemical (or other) means, even though both purposes are valid and good. "�[E]very action which . . . proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render reproduction impossible� is intrinsically evil" (2370). Now some couples are infertile, and their marriage can still radiate charity, hospitality, and sacrifice, perhaps through adoption of children or in other ways (1654). Also, the Church recognizes that Christian prudence is rightly exercised in limiting family size "in conformity with the generosity appropriate to responsible parenthood" (2368), prudence acted out in periodic continence (a.k.a. Natural Family Planning--NFP) based on self-observation and use of infertile periods (2370). The Church argues that the sexual act, rightly understood as "the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife," is contradicted by contraception, through which a couple refuses to give totally to the other; thus it "falsifi[es] the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality" (2370).

"To try to improve society is not worldliness but love. To wash your hands of society is not love but worldliness" (Snodgras 175).

"All the way to heaven is heaven."

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body; consubstantial [co-essential] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets from the beginning [have declared] concerning Him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.

"Many of us suffer from the morbid tendency to be instant "out of season." The season does not refer to time, but to us�"Be instant in season, out of season" [2Tim 4:2], whether we feel like it or not. If we do only what we feel inclined to do, some of us would do nothing for ever and ever. There are unemployables in the spiritual domain, spiritually decrepit people, who refuse to do anything unless they are supernaturally inspired. The proof that we are rightly related to God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not.

One of the great snares of the Christian worker is to make a fetish of the rare moments. When the Spirit of God gives you a time of inspiration and insight�"Now I will always be like this for God." No you will not, God will take care you are not. These times are the gift of God entirely. You cannot give them to yourself when you choose. If you say you will only be at your best, you will become an intolerable drag on God; you will never do anything unless God keeps you consciously inspired. If you make a god of your best moments, you will find that God will fade out of your life and never come back until you do the duty that lies nearest, and have learned not to make a fetish of your rare moments" (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, April 25).

"Love, in the form in which it exists in society, is nothing but the exchange of two fantasies and the superficial contact of two bodies."

"Who to himself is law, no law doth need,

Offends no law, and is a king indeed."

"They�re only truly great who are truly good."

"The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet."

He wrote to explain his reception to his mother: 'I think that the fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent must now be waged by the one fighting form of Christianity'.

"So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity). I am very proud of what people call Mariolatry; because it introduced into religion in the darkest ages that element of chivalry which is now being belatedly and badly understood in the form of feminism. I am very proud of being orthodox about the mysteries of the Trinity or the Mass; I am proud of believing in the Confessional; I am proud of believing in the Papacy'. Autobiography, pp.80-81

"Any one Catholic peasant, while holding one small bead of the Rosary in his fingers, can be conscious, not of one eternity, but of a complex and almost a conflict of eternities; as, for example, in the relations of Our Lord and Our Lady, of the fatherhood and the childhood of God, of the motherhood and childhood of Mary" (Chesterton, Where all Roads Lead, Catholic Truth Society, London 1963, p.10).

"If we are to be truly gay, then there must be some eternal gaiety in the nature of things" (in Titus 444).

"[Leisure] is being neglected in a degree which seems to me to threaten the degeneration of the whole race. It�s because artists do not practice, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to worship reverently the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion."

"Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy."

"Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities."

"The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing."

�When people stop believing in God, they won�t believe nothing; they will believe anything.�

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried."

"The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a search, and the Book of Job because all life is a mystery."

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

"If a heresy is sufficiently heretical, it will influence one's morals."

"The convert commonly passes through three stages or states of mind. The first is when he imagines himself to be entirely detached . . . that of the young philosopher who feels that he ought to be fair to the Church of Rome. He wishes to do it justice; but chiefly because he sees that it suffers injustice . . . I had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than of becoming a cannibal. I imagined that I was merely pointing out that justice should be done even to cannibals . . .

The second stage is that in which the convert begins to be conscious not only of the falsehood but the truth . . . It consists in discovering what a very large number of lively and interesting ideas there are in the Catholic philosophy . . . This process, which may be called discovering the Catholic Church, is perhaps the most pleasant and straightforward part of the business . . . It is like discovering a new continent full of strange flowers and fantastic animals, which is at once wild and hospitable . . . It is these numberless glimpses of great ideas, that have been hidden from the convert by the prejudices of his provincial culture, that constitute the adventurous and varied second stage of the conversion. It is, broadly speaking, the stage in which the man is unconsciously trying to be converted�.

The third stage is perhaps . . . the most terrible. It is that in which the man is trying not to be converted . . . He is filled with a sort of fear . . . He discovers a strange and alarming fact . . . a truth that Newman and every other convert has probably found in one form or another. It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it . . .

All steps except the last step he has taken eagerly on his own account, out of interest in the truth . . . I for one was never less troubled by doubts than in the last phase, when I was troubled by fears. Before that final delay I had been detached and ready to regard all sorts of doctrines with an open mind . . . I had no doubts or difficulties just before. I had only fears; fears of something that had the finality and simplicity of suicide . . . It may be that I shall never again have such absolute assurance that the thing is true as I had when I made my last effort to deny it . . .

At the last moment of all, the convert often feels as if . . . he is look through a little crack or crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he stares at it; but it is an opening that looks towards the Altar. Only, when he has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside . . .

There is generally an interval of intense nervousness . . . To a certain extent it is a fear which attaches to all sharp and irrevocable decisions; it is suggested in all the old jokes about the shakiness of the bridegroom at the wedding . . . He wonders whether the whole business is an extraordinarily intelligent and ingenious confidence trick . . . There is in the last second of time or hair's breadth of space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the unfathomable forces of the universe . . . That anything described as so bad should turn out to be so good is itself a rather arresting process having a savour of something sensational and strange . . . (Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion, NY: Macmillan, 1926, pp.57-66).

----------Orthodoxy----------

"I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities is precisely belief in objective truth. . . . Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 64).

"The man who cannot believe his senses [solipsist], and the man who cannot believe anything else [materialist], are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 46-47).

"You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul. But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action. By this praise of the will you cannot really choose one course as better than another. And yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising. The worship of the will is the negation of will. To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 69).

"[It is crucial to understand the] sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. . . . scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. They do not really talk as if they had found only a set of marvelous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do talk as if the connection of two strange things connected them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible thing follows another incomprehensible thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. . . . [W]e cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince [in a fairy tail]. . . . Granted then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the �Laws of Nature.� . . . It is not a law, for we do not understand its formula. It is not a necessary, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 91-93).

"All the towering materialism that dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe were personal, it would vary; if the sun were alive, it would dance. . . . It may not be automatic necessary that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. . . . The repetition is nature may not be a mere recurrence; but a theoretical encore " (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 107-109).

"[Herbert Spenser] popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the universe ought to overawe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; . . . It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 110-111).

"Love is not blind; that is the last thing it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound, the less it is blind" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 129).

"An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma , we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. . . . If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in a miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in a miracle in any age" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 135-136).

"In this [optimist/pessimist] dilemma [about whether to love or hate the world] . . . Christianity suddenly stepped in and offered a singular answer . . . Briefly it divided God from the cosmos. That transcendence and distinctness of the deity which some Christians now want to remove from Christianity was really the only reason why any one wanted to be a Christian. . . . It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce in the divine act of making . . . was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world. According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. . . . In this way one could be both happy and indignant without degrading one�s self to be either a pessimist or an optimist. On this system one could fight all the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence. One could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with the world" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 141-143).

"There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: �the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach.� It is false; it is the opposite of the fact. The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach. . . .They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feast. They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught. . . . Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 238-240).

"[T]hat Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike. . . is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it. The reasons were of two kinds: resemblances that meant nothing because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances that were not resemblances at all. The author solemnly explained that the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike, or else he described them as alike in some point in which they are obviously quite different. Thus, as a case of the first class, he said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the divine voice coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice to come out of the coal-cellar. . . . That Buddhism approves of mercy or of self-restraint is not to say that it is specially like Christianity; it is only to say that it is not utterly unlike all human existence. . . . All humanity does agree that we are in a net of sin. Most of humanity agrees that there is some way out. But as to what is the way out, I do not think that there are two institutions in the universe which contradict each other so flatly as Buddhism and Christianity. . . . If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. . . . It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism and immanence. And it is just here that Christianity is on the side of humanity and liberty and love. Love desires personality; therefore loves desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. . . . This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 240-246).

"There is no real possibility of getting out of pantheism any special impulse to moral action. For pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good as another; whereas action implies in its nature that one thing is greatly preferable to another" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 247).

"If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe Christianity, I can only answer, �For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.� I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy by four books than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion. Now, the non Christianity of the average educated man today is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid and varied kind as his evidences against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way. . . . I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something; only when I came to look at the facts I always found they pointed to something else" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 264-265, 270).

"my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. . . . Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbeliveers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidences for them. The disbeliveers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them . . . [i.e.] the main principle of materialism�the abstract impossibility of miracle" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 278-279).

-----The Thing-------------

[the difference between Arminian and Calvinist predestination]: "It is the difference between believing God knows, as a fact, that I will choose to go to the devil; and believing that God has given me to the devil without my having any choice at all" (Chesterton The Thing 59).

"Many medieval men failed to live up to those ideals. But many more modern men are more disastrously failing in the attempt to live without them" (The Thing, 129).

"Out of the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh" (The Thing 206).

* "the faith gives back a man his body and his soul and his reason and his will and his very life. . . . the man who has received it receives all the old human functions which all the other philosophies are already taking away. . . . that he alone will have freedom, that he alone will have will, because he alone believes in free will; that he alone will have reason, since ultimate doubt denies reason as well as authority; that he alone will truly act, because action is performed to an end" (The Thing).

-----Heretics-----------

"It is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. . . . what we dread about our neighbors, in short, is not the narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it. . . . We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor" (Heretics 182, 184, 185).

* "We actually love ourselves more than we love joy" (Heretics 231).

"There are no things for which men will make such Herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy [e.g. man in love]. . . . The whole secret of the practical success of Christendom lies in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled" (Heretics 69).

"The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they don�t even know that they are dogmas. . . . We have a general view of existence, whether we like it or not; it alters, or to speak more accurately, it creates and involves everything we say or do, whether we like it or not. . . . Every man in the street must hold a philosophical system, and hold it firmly. . . . he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence" (Heretics 302).

"But there are some people, nevertheless�and I am one of them�who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy�s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy�s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them" (Heretics 15-16).

"the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science. . . . All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely hopeless but crazy" (Heretics 146).

"That there is no golden rule is itself a golden rule; a fetter on the first movement of a man" (Heretics 61).

--------The Everlasting Man-----------

"It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it was the world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War�they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do" (TEM 10).

* "Whatever else men may have believed, they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind" (TEM 53).

* "The Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better" (121).

* "men need not live for food merely because they cannot live without food" (TEM 138).

"What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that dogma is literally too good to be true. That is, he means that dogma is too liberal to be likely. Dogma gives man too much freedom when it permits him to fall. Dogma gives God too much freedom when it permits him to die. That is what the intelligent skeptics ought to say; and it is not in the least my intention to deny that there is something to be said for it. . . . they mean quite simply that they cannot believe these things; not in the least that they are unworthy of belief. We say, not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth" (TEM 243).

"Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news" (TEM 269).

"Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees. Leucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavored to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men�s eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chance. But it was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. . . . It was the end of the world and the worst of it was that it need never end" (The Everlasting Man, p.162-163).

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened."

"The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see."

"He that lies down with dogs will get up with fleas."

"Let us . . . brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and its Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say: �This was their finest hour�." (June 8, 1940 House of Commons).

About Munich Pact: "[the people] should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war . . . they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history . . . and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: �Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.� And do not suppose this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we shall arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden times" (in Schaeffer Vol 5 p.249-250).

�All I can do is urge you to put friendship ahead of all other human concerns, for there is nothing so suited to man�s nature, nothing that can mean so much to him, whether in good times or in bad . . . I am inclined to think that with the exception of wisdom, the gods have given nothing finer to men than this� (Marcus Tulli, Cicero).

"There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it."

"instead of beginning with facts and later discovering God [empiricism], unless a thinker begins with God, he can never end with God, or get the facts either" (Clark, A Christian Philosophy of Education, 38).

�[Man] ought not be ashamed to mention what God was not ashamed to create.�

�Who will not go the strait way to Heaven, they shall go the soft way to Hell.�

�I tell the truly, that the devil hath his contemplative as God hath his� (Cloud of Unknowing).

"He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all" (Pilot One).

"He prayeth best that loveth best."

"Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind."

"Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom."

"When you have nothing to say, say nothing."

"Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship�never"

"Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life."

"Salvation is not static, but dynamic; it is not a completed state, a state of having arrived . . . but a constant moving . . . toward becoming like Christ, toward receiving the fullness of God�s life . . . it can never be achieved fully in this life."

To HG Wells: "You don�t really care for people, but you think they can be improved; I do, but I know they can�t"

"...if there were no necessary being, no being which must exist, and cannot not-exist, nothing would exist. . . . Something does exist; therefore, there must be something which accounts for this fact, a being which is outside the series of contingent beings" (Smith 249).

�Christians should certainly be prepared to recognize the values present in other religions. Short of embracing all mankind there can be no limit to the reach of the out-going love which lies at the heart of the Christian religion, and which can be seen as demanding the extension of the ecumenical movement to relations between Christians and adherents of other religions.... [But] one should not close one's eyes to the danger of abandoning Christian belief in the unique status and role of Christ and treating him simply as one among other prophets and religious leaders, a danger which is by no means illusory.�

�We are sometimes told by 'progressives' that we should think of the Church as seeking the truth, rather than as being in possession of the truth. That the Church's theologians seek truth is not a claim which I would venture or wish to deny. But they discharge this function as members of the Church, not simply as lone individuals. And the final court of appeal in doctrinal issues can hardly be anything but the Church herself, speaking as a teaching authority, through what is called the ... My point is simply that if a theologian claims to be a [Catholic], he or she should act as such, operating within the Church, as one of its members.�

�The ideas of Heaven and Hell are complementary... if the one idea expresses revelation, so does the other. The orthodox Christian can be expected to accept both; and I do accept them.... Possession of freedom implies that a human being can accept or reject God.... I do not see how one can exclude the possibility of a human being persisting in his or her choice against God and so remaining in a state of alienation from God. Given this possibility, Hell would be more something chosen by the human being in question, than simply imposed by a ruthless judge.�

�The Christian is not committed to believing that if Christianity finds itself widely regarded as moribund and as unable to act as an effective source of inspiration, this shows that Christ has failed. Where in the Gospels is He recorded as having assured His followers of a triumphal march through history? Perhaps I may add that Christ did not claim that if His followers encountered difficulties and opposition they should set to work revising His teaching and adapting it to the spirit of the age. He called for persevering loyalty.�

�The only really important evaluation of one's life and work is God's evaluation. And in the closing years of one's life it is just as well to bear this in mind.�

"He is the freeman whom the truth makes free."

"Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom in minds attentive to their own."

�theologians deduced consequence after consequence and saints and mystics could realize in themselves and show forth to others aspect after aspect�detail after detail. So that every generation knows Christ not less but more clearly, more vividly, than the generation before it, the faithful ever increasing their grasp of the Truth, the riches of which all generations to the end of time cannot suffice to exhaust� (Handbook of Heresies 50).

"Evangelicals have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as irrational or outmoded, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders have absorbed this viewpoint. This is a war which we cannot afford to lose" (Bill Craig xiii).

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."

"He cannot have God for his father who has not the church for his mother."

"Faults are thick where love is thin."

"You have laid hands on my whole life. May it rise and challenge you. . . . you want to stifle the Republic in blood. How long must the footsteps of freedom be gravestones? Tyranny is afoot; she has torn her veil, she carries her head high, she strides over our dead bodies" (Koestler 204).

"In the long run a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity" (about US Civil War).

"Looking at the world at no distant date, what an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world"

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

"Nature has left this tincture in the blood,

That all men would be tyrants if they could."

Charles Dickens

"The New Testament is the best book the world has ever known and will know."

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

"History is philosophy from examples" (Dionysius of Halicarnassus).

Benjamin Disraeli

"Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret."

"Little things affect little minds."

"Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage."

John Donne

"When I dies last, and Dear, I die

As often as from thee I go,

Though it be but an hour ago,

And lovers� hours be full eternity" (John Donne; Dictionary of Quotations).

"There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once" (John Donne; Dictionary of Quotations).

"No man is an island, entire of itself."

"Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies."

Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. The Infinite and the Eternal are as essential for man as the little planet on which he dwells."

"People will not find peace through intellectual progress and the law of necessity but through the moral acknowledgment of a higher beauty that is a universal ideal."

"If there is no God, there is no morality."

"[Alyosha] accepted everything without the least condemnation, though often with deep sadness" (19).

"perfect freedom�that is, freedom from [one]self" (28).

"�Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continuously to others and to himself" (44).

"Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people�s sins" (52).

"One cannot prove anything here [about God�s existence], but it is possible to be convinced. . . . By the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly, The more you succeed in loving, the more you�ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter into your soul" (56).

"[Our justice system should changed from the pagan] mechanical cutting off of the infected member, as is done now for the preservation of society, and transform, fully now and not falsely, into the idea of the regeneration of man anew, of his restoration and salvation. . . . If anything protects society even in our time, and even reforms the criminal himself and transforms him into a different person, again it is Christ�s law alone, which manifests itself in the acknowledgment of one�s own conscience" (63-64).

"It is not the Church that turns into the state, you see. That is the third temptation of the devil! But, on the contrary, the state turns into the Church, it rises up to the Church and the Church over all the earth" (66).

"There is no virtue if there is no immortality" (70).

* "thank the Creator that he has given you a lofty heart, capable of being tormented by such a torment, �to set your mind on things that are above, for our true homeland is in heaven�" (70).

"Can there be beauty in Sodom? Believe me, for the vast majority of people, that just where beauty lies�did you know that secret? The terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart" (108).

"[Ivan:] �It�s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God�s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept" (235).

"no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically, cruel" (238).

"[Ivan:] Who wants to know this damned good and evil at such a price?" (242).

" Decide for yourself who was right: you or the one who questioned you then? Recall the first question; it�s meaning though not literally, was this: "You want to go into the world and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom, which they in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend�for nothing has ever been more insufferable for man than freedom! But do you see these stones in this bare, scorching desert? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient, though eternally trembling lest you withdraw your hand and your loaves cease for them." But you did not want to deprive man of his freedom and rejected the offer, for what sort of freedom is it, you reasoned, if obedience is bought with loaves of bread? You objected that man does not live by bread alone, but do you know . . . that centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom [Marxism] that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men? "Feed them first, then ask virtue of them!"�that is what they will write on the banner they raise against you, and by which your temple will be destroyed. They will seek us out again . . . and cry out, "feed us for those who promised us heaven did not give it". . . [We will feed them and] in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, "Better that you enslave us, but feed us." They will finally understand that freedom and the earthly bread in plenty for everyone are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share among themselves. They will also be convinced that they are forever incapable of being free, because they are feeble, depraved, nonentities and rebels.

And if in the name of heavenly bread thousands and ten thousands will follow you, what will become of the millions and ten millions who will not be strong enough to forgo the earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly?. . . Had you accepted the "loaves," you would have answered the universal and everlasting anguish of . . . mankind, namely, "before whom shall I bow down?". . . But man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable, so indisputable that all men at once agree to the universal worship of it. . . You knew . . . this essential mystery of human nature, but you rejected the only absolute banner, which was offered to you to make all men bow down to you indisputably�the banner of the earthly bread . . . Now see what you did next. And all again in the name of freedom! . . . Instead of taking over men�s freedom, you increased it still more for them! . . . There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation for appeasing human conscience once and for all, you chose . . . everything that was beyond men�s strength, and thereby acted as if you did not love them at all . . .You desired the free love of man, that he follow you freely, seduced and captivated by you. Instead of the firm ancient law, man henceforth had to decide for himself, with a free heart, what is good and evil, having only your image before him as a guide�but did it not occur to you that eventually he would dispute and reject even your image and your truth if he was oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice? They will finally cry out that the truth is not in you, for it was impossible to leave them in greater confusion and torment than you did . . . Thus you yourself laid the foundation for the destruction of your own kingdom, and do not blame anyone else for it. . . .

There are three powers, only three powers on earth, capable of conquering and holding captive forever the conscience of these feeble rebels, for their own happiness�these powers are miracle, mystery, and authority. You rejected [all three] and gave yourself as an example of that. When the dread and wise spirit set you on a pinnacle of the temple and said to you, "If you would know whether or not you are the Son of God, cast yourself down . . ." But you heard and rejected the offer and did not yield and throw yourself down. . .[but] are there many like you? . . . You did not know that as soon as man rejects miracles, he rejects God as well, for man seeks not so much God but miracles. And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create miracles for himself. . . You did not come down [from the cross] because, again, you did not want to enslave man by a miracle [but instead, you] thirsted for faith that is free, not miraculous. You thirsted for a love that is free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that has left him permanently terrified. But here, too, you overestimated mankind, for of course, they are slaves [and even if a few exceptional saints can live with freedom, what about the masses who cannot?]. . .

Can it be that you indeed came only to the chosen ones and for the chosen ones? But if so, there is a mystery here, and we cannot understand it. And if it is a mystery, then we, too, had to preach mystery and teach them that it is not the free choice of the heart that matters, and not love, but the mystery, which they must blindly obey even setting aside their own conscience. And so we did. We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that once more they were led like sheep . . . Have we not, indeed, loved mankind, in so humbly recognizing their impotence . . . Listen, then: we are not with you, but with him, that is our secret! For a long time now�eight centuries already�we have not been with you but with him.. Exactly eight centuries ago we took from him what you so indignantly rejected, that last gift he offered you when he showed you all the kingdoms of the world: we took Rome and the sword of Caesar from him and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth . . . Why did you reject that last gift? Had you accepted that third council of the mighty spirit, you would have finished all that man seeks on earth, that is: someone to bow down to someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common, concordant, and incontestable anthill�for the need for universal union is the third and last torment of men. . . Had you accepted the world and Caesar�s purple, you would have founded a universal kingdom and granted universal peace. For who shall possess mankind if not those who possess their conscience and give them their bread? And so we took Caesar�s sword, and in taking it, of course, we rejected you and followed him" (Dostoevsky 252-258).

"life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over" (288).

"Why count the days when even one day is enough for a man to know all happiness? My dears, why do we quarrel, boast before each other, remember each other�s offenses? Let us go to the garden, let us walk and play and love and praise and kiss one another, and bless our life" (289).

"Let me be sinful before everyone, but so that everyone will forgive me, and that is paradise. Am I not in paradise now?" (290).

"Here for once in my life I have acted sincerely, and what then? I�ve become a sort of holy fool for you all, and though you�ve come to love me, you still laugh at me" (301).

"Paradise . . . is hidden in each one of us, it is concealed within me, too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow, even, and for the rest of my life. . . . [E]ach man [is] guilty before all and for all, besides his own sins . . . And indeed it is true that when people understand this thought, the Kingdom of God will come to them, no longer in a dream, but in reality. . . . This is a matter of the soul, a psychological matter. In order to make the world over anew, people themselves must turn onto a different path psychically. Until one has indeed become the brother of all, there will be no brotherhood. No science or self-interest will ever enable people to share their property and their rights among themselves without offense" (303).

"For everyone now strives most of all to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation. For all men in our age are separated into units, each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing himself away from people and pushing people away from himself. He accumulates wealth in solitude, thinking: how strong, how secure I am now; and does not see, madman as he is, that the more he accumulates, the more he sinks into suicidal impotence. For he is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people�s help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles lest his money and his acquired privileges perish. . . . But there must needs come an end to this horrible isolation, and everyone will all at once realize how unnaturally they have separated themselves from one another. . . . Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the heavens" (303-04).

"I know that paradise will come to me, will come at once, the moment I tell [of my sin]. For fourteen years I have been in hell. I want to suffer. I will embrace suffering and begin to live" (308).

"The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide" (313).

* "If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day" (319).

"A loving humility is a terrible power, the most powerful of all, nothing compares to it" (319).

* "But on earth we are indeed wandering, as it were, and did we not have the precious image of Christ before us, we would perish and be altogether lost, like the race of men before the flood. Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings and not here but in other worlds . . . God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth . . . [If the] sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds . . . is destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it" (320).

"Love to throw yourself down on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it, tirelessly, insatiably, love all men, love all things, seek this rapture with ecstasy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears. Do not be ashamed of this ecstasy, treasure it, for it is a gift of God, a great gift, and it is not given to many, but to those who are chosen" (322).

[Zosima] "�What is hell?� And I answer thus: �The suffering of being no longer able to love.� . . . People speak of the material flames of hell. I do not explore this mystery, and I fear it, but I think that if there were material flames, truly people would be glad to have them, as I fancy, in material torment they might forget, at least for a moment, their far more terrible spiritual torment. And yet it is impossible to take this spiritual torment from them, for this torment is not external but is within them. And were it possible to take it from them, then, I think, their unhappiness would be even greater because of it. . . . there are those who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of irrefutable truth . . . they are sufferers by their own will. . . . And they will burn eternally in the fire of their wrath, thirsting for death and nonexistence. But they will not find death (322-23).

"Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the flowerbeds near the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the stars . . . Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth. He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages. . . . It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over" (362).

"nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it. . . . The devil has incarnated himself in this vanity and crept into a whole generation" (557).

"there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory. . . . perhaps just this memory alone will keep him from great evil, and he will think of it and say: �Yes, I was kind, brave, and honest then�" (774-75).

Arthur Conan Doyle

"It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, That the lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius."

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" (Arthur Conan Doyle).

Henry Drummond

"Every one has asked himself that great question of antiquity as of the modern world: What is the summum bonum�the supreme good? You have life before you. Once only you can live it. What is the noblest object of desire, the supreme gift to covet? . . . �The greatest of these is love.� . . . �Love is the fulfilling of the law.� Did you ever think what he meant by that? In those days men were working their passage to Heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments, and the hundred and ten other commandments which they had manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will show you a more simple way. If you do one thing, you will do these hundred things, without ever thinking abut them. If you love, you will unconsciously fulfill the whole law. And you can readily see for yourselves how that must be so" (7-8).

"To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with love. We want to live forever for the same reason we want to live to-morrow. Why do you want to live to-morrow? It is because there is some one who loves you, and whom you want to see to-morrow, and be with, and love back. There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved. It is when a man has no one to love him that he commits suicide. So long as he has friends, those who love him and whom he loves, he will live; because to live is to love. Be it but the love of a dog, it will keep him in life; but let that go and he has no contact with life, no reason to live. The "energy of Life" has failed. Eternal life also is to know God, and God is love" (32-33).

"The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult" (Mme Du Deffand).

"The erosion that precedes the major moral lapse is seldom publicly visible. Characters dissolve much as they are built up, by a slow accumulation of seemingly unimportant deeds"

"Love, I perceived, was the strongest impulse of the human heart, yet in my philosophy [materialism] it held no place. The fatal defect of my outlook in life, oriented as it was toward the pursuit of pleasure, was that it thwarted the most basic human instincts, to love, to labor, and to serve. Hence the shallowness and misery of my existence which daily threatened to become intolerable. My philosophy failed me because it was not big enough to contain the human, let alone the heroic" (Testimony to Grace 30).

"The man who refuses to face the philosophic problem is like a traveler in the night who will not take the time to decide where he is going because he is in too much of a hurry to be on his way. He hastens first in one direction, then in the other, repeatedly striking his foot against cobblestones and stumbling in ruts, without approaching any nearer his destination. He becomes a slave to his irrational impulses which incline him now this way and now that. Eventually he resolves that he will follow the crowd, but he has no way of telling whether they are proceeding to the same destination or whether they know where it is located. They disagree among themselves and he listens to their confused, discordant counsels. Finally he resolves to follow the man who speaks in the loudest, most emphatic tones. When he has been led to one of those dead ends where error ends in impossibility he finds out to his grief that the ignorant prophet whom he had chosen to follow was one of those hireling leaders who speak with conviction in order to gratify a personal passion for having others follow them" (42). (cf. Pascal)

Leap of faith = "To make a subjective certainty out of an objective probability" (59).

�Without the resources of Scripture, Tradition, and the magisterium, the People of God would not be able to resist the pressure to fall back into the old world from which Christ came to rescue them� (Dulles New World, p.104).

"We are establishing an all-time world record in the production of material things. What we lack is a righteous and dynamic faith. Without it, all else avails us little. The lack cannot be compensated for by the politicians, however able; or by diplomats, however astute; or by scientists, however inventive; or by bombs, however powerful."

�Friendship consists in forgetting what one gives and remembering what one receives.�

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome�s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars."

"If a man is fortunate, he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children."

"There is no greater drama in human record than the right of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won."

Gerhald Ebeling (Neoorthodoxy on Intellectual dimensions of justification by faith alone)

"The sola fide doctrine of justification both contains a rejection of any existing ways of ensuring present actualization, whether ontological, sacramental, or hierarchical, and also positively includes an understanding of actualization in the sense of genuinely historic, personal encounter. Of this encounter with the historic revelation takes place solely in hearing the Word, then the shattering of all historical assurances that supposedly render the decision of faith superfluous is completely in line with the struggle against the saving significance of good works or against understanding the work of the sacrament in the sense of the opus operatum."

classical definition of religion: "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community..."

"The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me" (Meister Eckhart).

"Certainly it would be wrong to regard all occupations or all places or all people as of equal value. Certainly praying is better than spinning and the church is a nobler place than the street. But you should preserve and carry with you into the crowd and into the tumult of the world the spirit with which you are in the church or in your cell. The same mood must be in your heart wherever you are, and you must everywhere cling to your God with the same earnestness."

"Of all kinds of knowledge that we can ever obtain, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are the most important."

"Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."

�A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.�

"In every parting there is an image of death."

"Our deeds still travel with us from afar,

And what we have been makes us what we are."

"Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important."

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins" (The Waste Land).

"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless. . .
Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death�s other Kingdom
Remember us�if at all�not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men. . . .
This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man�s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death�s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone. . . .
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech . . .
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow. . . .
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang hut a whimper (T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men).

"But then it comes again, in a different way, perhaps, but loneliness all the same�the reminder that I was made for God, my heart will never rest anywhere else, and nothing the world can offer will satisfy" (Loneliness 148).

"God, I pray Thee, light these idle sticks of my life and may I burn up for Thee. Consume my life, my God, for it is Thine. I seek not a long life but a full one, like you, Lord Jesus."

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

"all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons."

�Character is that which can do without success.�

�Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.�

�The lesson of life is to believe what the years and centuries say against the hours.�

�When it dark enough, men see the stars.�

"One lesson that we learn early�that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion."

"A little integrity is better than any career."

"Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs."

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen."

"If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain thinks he slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again" ("Brahma").

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."

"People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them"

"To fill the hour�that is happiness"

"The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it"

"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist"

"We are always getting ready to live, but never living"

"Authority has proceeded from true reason, not vice versa reason from authority. For every authority which is not approved by true reason appears feeble; on the other hand, true reason, because it rests soundly and immutable upon its own strength, needs no enforcement on the part of any authority; for true reason appears to me to be no other than the truth found by reason� I, chap 49.

"[V]irtue . . . is the only invincible and imperishable possession" (342).

"The fight for emancipation from tradition therefore prepares a new despotism, that of anti-traditionalism, the tyranny of progress as a necessary law of historical development. . . . Nobody can deny the importance and positive contribution of the challenge to tradition, but it is clear the equation of tradition and error is simplistic and utterly unsustainable. Such an equation is the result of undue, that is mechanical, rigorous application of the analytico-scientific method to the socio-historical sphere. This is the root of technocratic illusions and of the confusion between technical progress and moral progress. . . Progress and civilization are not automatic, but are only human enterprises which are exposed to setbacks, have no guarantee against regression, corruption, and failure, and are dominated by uncertainty and fear" (Franco 20-21, 23).

"Religion is the earliest and truly indirect form of human self-consciousness. For this reason, religion precedes philosophy in the history of humanity in general, as well as in the history of individual human beings. Initially, people mistakenly locate their essential nature as if it were outside of themselves, before finally recognizing that it is actually within them . . . The historical progress of religion consists therefore in this: that what an earlier religion took to be objective, is later recognized to be subjective; what formerly was taken to be God, and worshipped as such, is now recognized to be something human. What was earlier religion is taken to be idolatry: humans are seen to have adored their own nature. Humans objectified themselves but failed to recognize themselves as this object" (Essence of Christianity).

"Do not wish to be a philosopher in contrast to being a Man; be nothing more than a thinking man; do not think as I think, that is, with a faculty torn out of the totality of the real being of man and set up as something in and for itself! Think as a real, living being, as one exposed to the vivifying and refreshing surge of the sea of worldly experience; think in existence, in the world as a part of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction, like an isolated monad . . . " (in Barth�s Intro to Essence of Christianity xiii).

"While I do reduce theology to anthropology, I exalt anthropology to theology; very much as Christianity while lowering God into man, made man into God" (in Barth�s Intro to Essence of Christianity xv).

"Who then is our Savior and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and, in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God�the evil being�of religious fanaticism" (53).

"For every religion which has any claim to the name presupposes that God is not indifferent to the beings who worship him, that therefore what is human is not alien to him, that, as an object of human veneration, he is a human God. Every prayer discloses the secret of the Incarnation, every prayer is in fact an incarnation of God. In prayer, I invoke God in human distress, I make him a participator in my sorrows and wants" (54).

"the highest, the perfect being humiliates, lowers himself for the sake of man. Hence in God I learn to estimate my own nature; I have value in the sight of God; the divine significance of my nature is become evident to me. How can the worth of man be more strongly expressed than when God, for man�s sake, becomes a man, when man is the end, the object of divine love?" (57).

"God concerns himself about me; he has in view my happiness, my salvation; he wills that I should be blest; that that is my will also . . . God�s love for me [is] nothing else than my self-love deified" (105).

- "The essential standpoint of religion is the practical or subjective. The end of religion is the welfare, the salvation, the ultimate felicity of man; the relation of man to God is nothing else than his relation to his own spiritual good" (185).

----Essence of Religion----

"the foundation of religion is a feeling of dependency; the first object of that feeling is nature; thus nature is the first object of religion" (25).

"Fear is a feeling of dependency on an object without which I am nothing, which has the power to destroy me. Joy, love, and gratitude are feelings of dependency on an object thanks to which I am something, which gives me the feeling, the awareness that through it I live and am. Because I live and subsist through nature, or God, I love Him; because I suffer or perish through nature, I fear it and stand in awe of it" (31).

"Without belief in God the belief in immortality is without foundation; and without belief in immortality the belief in God is meaningless" (270).

My task: "to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of this world, Christians who, by their own profession and admission, are �half animal, half angel� into men, into whole men" (285).

"The ultimate secret of religion is the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, the voluntary and involuntary in one and the same individual. Man wills, but he does so unwillingly�how often he envies the beings who have no will; he is conscious, yet he achieves consciousness unconsciously�how gladly he deprives himself of consciousness, and how gladly he relapses into unconsciousness at the end of his day�s work! He lives and yet he is without power over the beginning and end of his life. He is the outcome of a process of development, yet once he exists, it seems to him as though he had come into being through a unique act of creation, as though he had shot up overnight, like a mushroom. He has a body and every appearance of pleasure or pain he feels it to be his own, and yet he is a stranger in his own house; pleasure is an unearned reward, pain is an undeserved punishment; in happy moments he feels life is a gift he has not asked for; in unhappy moments a burden inflicted upon him against his will; he feels the torment of his needs without knowing whether the impulsion to do so comes from within or without, whether he is satisfying himself or some outside being.

Man with his ego or consciousness stands at the brink of a bottomless abyss; that abyss is his own unconscious being, which seems alien to him and inspires him with a feeling which expresses itself in words of wonderment such as : What am I? Where have I come from? To what end? And this feeling that I am nothing without a not-I which is distinct from me and yet intimately related to me, something other, which is at the same time my own being, is the religious feeling. But what part of me is I and what part not-I? Hunger as such, or its cause, is not-I; but the painful sensation or awareness of hunger which drives me to direct all my motor faculties toward an object which will appease this pain, is I. The elements, then, of the I or man, of the real man, are consciousness, feeling, voluntary movement�voluntary movement, I say, because involuntary movement is outside the sphere of the I, in the realm of the divine not-I�and that is why certain disorders, such as epilepsy, why states of madness have been looked upon as divine revelations or manifestations.

What we have just said about hunger applies also to the higher, spiritual impulses. I feel a desire to write poetry, I can satisfy it only by voluntary activity, but the underlying impulse is not-I; although I and not-I are so closely intertwined that one can be substituted for the other�for there is no such thing as a not-I without an I or vice-versa�this fusion of I and not-I is the secret, the essence, of individuality. . . .

What am I without senses, without imagination, without reason? . . . What, in general, are the outward miracles of nature compared to the miracle of our inner nature, of the mind? But is the eye a product of my hands, is the imagination a product of my will, is reason my invention? Or have I "given" to myself all these magnificent powers and talents, which are the foundation of my being and on which my existence depends? Is it my achievement, my work that I am a man?

No! I humbly recognize�and to this extent I am entirely in agreement with religion�that I have neither my eye nor any of my organs or talents. But that is as far as I can go along with religion. Shall I say, with religion, that someone gave me all my human capacities? No, I say that they grew from the womb of nature along with my I. . . .

[We observe in religion] the humility with which man recognizes that he did not obtain from himself what he is and has, that he does not possess his life and being but merely holds a lease on them and can therefore be deprived of them at any moment�who can guarantee that I will not lose my reason?�and that he consequently has no ground for self-conceit, pride, and arrogance. . . .

Religiosity, is nothing more than a virtue of modesty . . . the virtue which deters a man from overstepping the limits of his nature, from striving for what is beyond the capacity of man, from laying claim to the proud title of an author; it is the virtue which forbids him to look on any of his achievements as his own, for he derives the predisposition, the principles underlying even such skills as metalworking and weaving, not from himself but from nature. To be religious means: remember what you are, a man, a mortal" (310-314).

"There is hardly any difference between the members of a primitive tribe who defend their laws because they are laws of the gods . . . and a rationalist who appeals to objective standards, except that the former know what they are doing while the latter does not" (in McGrath 90).

"When I looked once more for Gatsby, he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness" (Great Gatsby 22).

"The eyes of Dr. T.J. Ekleburg are blue and gigantic- their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground" (Great Gatsby 23).

"He smiled understandingly- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced�or seemed to face�the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you had hoped to convey" (Great Gatsby 48).

"Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor" (Great Gatsby 79).

"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man may store up in his ghostly heart" (Great Gatsby 97).

"He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go�but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail" (Great Gatsby 149, about Gatby's quest for Daisy).

"Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor" (Great Gatsby 150).

"All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust" (Great Gatsby 151, about Daisy's artificial word).

"I told her [Myrtle] she might fool me but she couldn't fool God. I took her to the window...and I said, 'God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God! Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at he eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale, and enormous, from the dissolving light" (Great Gatsby 160).

"Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once, he stopped and shifted it a little...and in a moment disappeared among the yellowing trees" (Great Gatsby 161-62).

"...he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams in the air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees" (Great Gatsby 162).

"There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of the waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water" (Great Gatsby 163, description of Gatsby dead in pool).

"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I?" (Great Gatsby 179).

�I'm thirty...I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor" (Great Gatsby 179).

"I couldn't forgive him [Tom] or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . ." (Great Gatsby 160).

"As the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes- a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the first time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (Great Gatsby 182).

"Outside the Church there is no salvation because salvation is the Church."

"It is not enough to acknowledge by faith the deed of the divine redemption�one has to be born anew.� Florovsky, Creation and Redemption, p.262.

"God loves us the way we are, but he loves us too much to leave us that way."

"Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger."

"It is forbidden to forbid."

"Knowledge is a double repression. You�re imposing what you claim is true and you�re excluding all you claim is not true, so all such repression should be thrown over."

"Brother Francis," he said, "What would you do if you knew that the priest celebrating Mass had three concubines on the side?" Francis, without missing a beat, said slowly, "When it came time for holy Communion, I would go to receive the sacred Body of my Lord from the priest's anointed hands."

"Pity and forbearance should characterize all acts of justice."

�A wise man will never desire more than he can get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly.�

"Work as if you were to live one hundred years; Pray as if you were to die tomorrow."

"He that�s content hath enough. He that complains, has too much.

"A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district�all studied and appreciated as they merit�are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty."

"There never was a good war, or a bad peace."

"When a religion is good...it will support itself and when it cannot support itself and God does not care to support it, so that professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, it is the sign...of its being a bad one."

". . . the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth�that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We've been assured in the sacred writing that, 'Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.'...[W]ithout his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel . . ." [June 28, 1787, after weeks of particularly harsh arguments at the Constitutional Convention, Franklin spoke in favor of opening each session in prayer] St. John, Constitutional Journal, p.77-78 and "America's Godly Heritage."

"Man�s main task in life is to give birth to himself."

"Every man is an island, and often you row round and round before you find a place to land."

Everyone has two needs: to work and to love