"No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow�s burden is added to today that the weight is more than a man can bear. Never load yourself so. If you find yourself so loaded, at least remember this: it is your own doing, not God�s. He begs you to leave the future to him, and mind the present."

I said: "Let me walk in the field;"
God said: "Nay, walk in the town;"
I said: "There are no flowers there;"
He said: "No flowers, but a crown."
I said: "But the sky is black,
There is nothing but noise and din;"
But He wept as He sent me back,
"There is more," He said, "there is sin."
I said: "But the air is thick,
And fogs are veiling the sun."
He answered: "Yet souls are sick,
And souls in the dark undone."
I said: "I shall miss the light,
And friends will miss me, they say,"
He answered me, "Choose tonight,
If I am to miss you, or they."
I pleaded for time to be given;
He said: "Is it hard to decide?
It will not seem hard in heaven,
To have followed the steps of your Guide."
I cast one look at the fields,
Then set my face to the town;
He said: "My child, do you yield?
Will you leave the flowers for the crown?"
Then into His hand went mine,
And into my heart came He;
And I walk in a light Divine,
The streets I feared to see."

"False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer, and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. . . . What is to-day a matter of academic speculation, begins to-morrow to move armies and pull down empires. . . . So as Christians we should try to mold the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity. . . . The chief obstacle to the Christian religion to-day lies in the sphere of the intellect . . . The Church is perishing to-day through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it" (J. Gresham Machen, 1912; Craig xiiii-xiv).

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite" (Federalist #45).

"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions...upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821)�neo-Catholic, antievolutionary writer; Sardinian ambassador at Petersburg for 15 years

"I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible" (Durant, The Lessons of History, 51).

"I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. . . . The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover that you have not won the world. Indeed it may turn out that you have actually lost the world" (George Malik, Lebanese Ambassador to US, The Two Tasks, 1980).

"If God is One, what is bad?" (Guiness 195).

"those who are truly pious and philosophers should honor and cherish the truth alone, scorning merely to follow the opinions of the ancients" (First Apology 242).

"the lover of truth ought to choose in every way, even at the cost of his life, to speak and do what is right, though death should take him away" (First Apology 242).

"we are firmly convinced that we can suffer no evil unless we are proved to be evildoers or shown to be criminals. You can kill us, but cannot do us any real harm" (First Apology 243).

"But since we place no hope in the present [order], we are not troubled by being put to death, since we will have to die somehow in any case" (First Apology 242).

"everyone goes to eternal punishment or salvation in accordance with the character of his actions" (First Apology 248).

"That spirit [Brahma], if spirit it may be called, self-created and independent of all other existence, though all that exists in it, the sole source of life in all that lives, has a grandeur that satisfies the imagination. But I have been busy with words too long not to be suspicious of them, and when I look at those I have just written I cannot but see that their meaning is tenuous. . . . The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme, and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four" (Maugham The Summing Up 168).

"If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good to come nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I am here for and how in these circumstances I must conduct myself. Now the answer to one of these questions is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for living and life has no meaning. We are here, inhabitants for a little while of a small planet, revolving around a minor star which in its turn is one of unnumbered galaxies. It may be that this planet alone can support life, or it may be that in other parts of the universe other planets have the possibility of forming a suitable environment to that substance from which, we suppose, along the vast course of time the men we are have been gradually created. And if the astronomer tells us truth this planet will eventually reach a condition when living things can no longer exist upon it and at long last the universe will attain that final state of equilibrium in which nothing more can happen. Aeons and aeons before this man will have disappeared. Is it possible to suppose that it will matter then that he ever existed? He will have been a chapter in the history of the universe as pointless as the chapter in which is written the life stories of the strange creatures that inhabited the primeval earth" (171).

"In no matter what creature, everything happens by necessary. It is therefore quite clear that God is responsible for everything that happens, evil as well as good. Just as much as Paul�s vocation, David�s adultery, Saul�s cruelties, and Judas� betrayal are all his work" (written with Luther�s approval; Delumeau 12).

�Never fight fair with a stranger. You'll never get out of the jungle that way� (Death of a Salesman 49)

�My salvation is that I never took any interest in anything� (Death of a Salesman 96).

�I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody!...I'm a dime a dozen and so are you!...You were never anything but a hard working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest...I'm not bringing home any prizes any more and you're going to stop waiting for me to bring them home...Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it any more. I'm just what I am, that's all� (Death of a Salesman 131-32).

�The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy...One must go in to fetch a diamond out� (Death of a Salesman 134).

�No man only needs a little salary� (Death of a Salesman 137).

"Any good worth if thou with labor do,
The labor goeth, the goodness doth remain;
If thou do evil, with pleasure joined thereto,
The pleasure which thine evil work doth contain
Glideth away, thou mayest him not restrain.
The evil then in thy breast cleveth behind
With grudge of heart and heaviness of mind" (More Utopia 56).

"Though a man may become learned by another�s learning, he can never be wise but by his own wisdom."

�To judge the past, we would need to have lived it; to condemn it, we would need not to be indebted to it for anything� (Montalembert).

"Give me, good Lord, a longing to be with thee: not for the avoiding of the calamities of this wicked world, nor so much for the avoiding of the pains of Purgatory, nor of the pains of Hell neither, nor so much for the attaining of the joys of Heaven in respect of mine one commodity, as even for a very love of thee" (Lives of Saints 190).

* "Nothing can come but that which God wills. And I make me very sure that whatsoever that be, seem it never so bad in sight, it shall indeed be the best" (CCC 313).

"The chief aim of their constitution and government is that, whenever public needs permit, all citizens should be free, so far as possible to withdraw their time and energy from the service of the body, and devote themselves to the freedom and culture of the mind, for that, they think, is the real happiness of life" (Utopia 44).

"every man might cultivate the religion of his choice, and might proselytize for it, provided he did so quietly, modestly, rationally, and without bitterness towards others" (80).

"People who have made up their minds to rush headlong down the opposite road are never pleased with the man who calls them back and tells them they are headed the wrong way. . . . How can one individual do any good when he is surrounded by colleagues who would sooner corrupt the best of men than do any reforming of themselves? Either they will seduce you, or, if you keep yourself honest and innocent, you will be made a screen for the knavery and madness of others. Influencing policy indirectly! You wouldn�t have a chance. This is why Plato in a very fine comparison declares that wise men are right in keeping clear of government matters. They see the people swarming through the streets and getting soaked with rain, and they cannot persuade them to go indoors and get out of the wet. They know if they go themselves, they can do no good but only get drenched with the rest. So they stay indoors and are content to keep themselves day, since they cannot remedy the folly of everyone else" [Plato, Republic VI.496] (More 30).

"Anyone who thinks happiness consists of this sort of pleasure [eating, drinking, etc] must confess that his ideal life would be one spent in an endless round of hunger, thirst, and itching, followed by eating, drinking, scratching, and rubbing. Who fails to see that such an existence is not only disgusting but miserable?" (60).

"What is planted in the minds of children lives on in the minds of adults, and is of great value in strengthening the state: the decline of a state can always be traced to vices which arise from wrong attitudes" (84).

"For what can be greater riches than for a man to live joyfully and peacefully, free from all anxieties, and without worries about making a living?" (88).

"What kind of justice is it when a nobleman or a goldsmith or a moneylender, or someone else who makes his living by doing either nothing at all or something completely useless to the public, gets to live a life of luxury and grandeur? In the meantime, a laborer, a carter, a carpenter, or a farmer works so hard and so constantly that even a beast of burden would perish under the load; and this work of theirs is so necessary that no commonwealth could survive a year without it. Yet they earn so meager a living and lead such miserable lives that a beast of burden would really be better off. . . . Now isn�t this an unjust and ungrateful commonwealth? It lavishes rich rewards on so-called gentry, bankers and goldsmiths and the rest of that crew, who don�t work at all, are mere parasites, or purveyors of empty pleasures. And yet it makes no provision whatever for the welfare of farmers and colliers, laborers, carters, and carpenters, without whom the commonwealth would simply cease to exist. . . . It is basically unjust that people who deserve most from the commonwealth should receive least. . . When I run over in my mind the various commonwealths flourishing today, so help me God, I can see nothing in them but a conspiracy of the rich, who are fattening up their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth" (88-89).

"I have no doubt that every man�s perception of where his true interest lies, along with the authority of Christ our Savior . . . would long ago have brought the whole world to adopt Utopian laws, if it were not for one single monster, the prime plague and begetter of all others�I mean Pride. Pride measures her advantages not by what she has but by what other people lack. Pride would not condescend even to be made a goddess, if there were no wretches for her to sneer at and domineer over. Her good fortune is dazzling only by contrast with the miseries of others, her riches are valuable only as they torment and tantalize the poverty of others." (90).

"This catholic known church is that mystical body be it never so sick, whereof the principal head is Christ. Of which body whither the successor of saint Peter be his vicar general and head under him, as all Christian nations have long taken him. . . . [It] is animated, has life spiritual, and is inspired with the holy spirit of God that maketh them of one faith in the house of God, by leading them into the consent of every necessary truth of revealed faith, be they in conditions and manners never so sick, as long as they be comfortable and content in unity of faith, to cleave unto the body. Of this church we cannot be deceived while we cleave to this church since this church is it into which god has given his spirit of faith, and in this church both good and bad confess one faith" (More 8:399).

"Every Communist must grasp the truth, �Political power grows only out of the barrel of a gun�"

"Believe me, wise men don't say �I shall live to do that�, tomorrow�s life�s too late; live today"

"Christ cannot save thy soul, for he is just."

"The philosophers have only explained the world; the point is to change it" (Theses on Feuerbach).

"What I did that was new was to prove . . . that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat"

"a society . . . cannot clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs" (Das Kapital, Preface).

"Religion�is the opium of the people" (Marx, Critique of Hegel�s Philosophy of Right).

Single-mindedness and success: "Only when a man will not do some things is he capable of doing great things" (Mencius IV.B.8)

* "Life is what I want; dutifulness is also what I want. If I cannot have both, I would rather take dutifulness than life. That is why I do not cling to life at all costs. On the other hand, though death is what I loathe, there is something I loathe more than death. That is why there are troubles I do not avoid. . . . there are ways of remaining alive and ways of avoiding death to which a man will not resort. In other words, there are things that a man wants more than life and there are also things he loathes more than death" (Mencius VI.A.10).

"�To try to achieve anything is like digging a well. You can dig a hole nine fathoms deep, but if you fail to reach the source of water, it is just an abandoned well�" (Mencius VII.A.29).

"What distinguishes [humanity] from the animals is his heart, for though this forms but a small part of his nature, it is both unique to man and the highest amongst his bodily organs" (16).

"The heart behind your action is sufficient to enable you to become a true King. . . . [T]hat peace is not brought to the people is because you fail to practice kindness. Hence your failure to become a true King is due to a refusal to act, not to an inability to act" (Mencius I.A.7)

"�If you have a great fondness for music, then there is perhaps hope for the state of Ch�i. Whether it is the music of today or the music of antiquity makes no difference�" (Mencius I.A.1).

"�No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others. . . . Suppose a man were, all of a sudden to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion, not because he wanted to get in the good graces of the parents, nor because he wished to win the praise of his fellow villagers or friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child. From this it can be seen that whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human, whoever is devoid of the heart of shame is not human, whoever is devoid of the heart of courtesy and modesty is not human, and whoever is devoid of the heart of right and wrong is not human. The heart of compassion is the germ of benevolence; the heart of shame, of dutifulness; the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observaance of the rites; the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom. Man has these four germs, just as he has four limbs. For a man possessing these four germs to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple himself (Mencius II.A.6).

-Does not tell us very much. A man who has lost his true heart may no longer be different from an animal according to Mencius� theory, but he still is a member of human society and as such, his actions make a difference for humans.

Naive about human nature

"Those who are obedient to Heaven are preserved; those who go againt Heaven are annihilated" (Mencius IV.A.7).

"Only when a man invites insult will others insult him. Only when a family invites destruction will others destroy it. Only when a state invites invasion will others invade it" (IV.A.8). Often a good man, who does nothing to invite insult, will provoke insult anyway. Now, it may be said that he does invite the insult by being good. But if that is so, Mencius can be stating nothing but the obvious for no clear reason.

"He who loves others is always loved by them; he who respects others is always respected by them" (IV.B.28).

--this doesn�t happen. So, the gentleman will say to himself "�This man does not know what he is doing. Such a person is no different from an animal. One cannot expect an animal to know any better�" (IV.B.28).

"There is no man who is not good; there is no water that does not flow downwards. Now in the case of water, by splashing it one can make it shoot up . . . How can that be the nature of water? It is the circumstances being what they are. That man can be made bad shows that his nature is no different from that of water in this respect" (Mencius VI.A.2).

"�What is common to all hearts? Reason and rightness. . . . Thus reason and rightness please my heart in the same way as meat pleases my palate�" (Mencius VI.A.7).

"�Heaven has not sent down men whose endowment differs so greatly. The difference is due to what ensnares their hearts�" (Mencius VI.A.7).

Ox mtn (Mencius VI.A.8).

"�Sad it is indeed when a man gives up the right road instead of following it and allows his heart to stray without enough sense to go after it. When his chickens and dogs stray, he has sense enough to go after them, but not when his heart strays�" (Mencius VI.A.11).

"�When one�s finger is inferior to other people�s, one has sense enough to resent it, but not when one�s heart is inferior.�" (Mencius VI.A.12).

Though equally human, some men are greater than others. Why? "He who nurtures the parts of smaller importance is a small man; he who nurtures the parts of greater importance is a great man" (VI.A.14).

The organ of the heart can think. (VI.A.15)

"�The trouble with a man is surely not his lack of sufficient strength, but his refusal to make the effort�" (Mencius VI.B.2).

"every man has in him that which is exalted. The fact simply never dawned on him" (Mencius VI.A.17). The first step toward solving the problem is thus to realize our true nature.

"�A trail through the mountains, if used, becomes a path in a short time, but if, unused, becomes blocked by grass in an equally short time. Now your heart is blocked by grass" (Mencius VII.B.21).

"The trouble with people is that they leave their own fields to weed the fields of others. They are exacting towards others but indulgent towards themselves�" (Mencius VII.B.32).

"�As far as what is genuinely in him is concerned, a man is capable of becoming good . . . That is what I mean by good. As for becoming bad, that is not the fault of his native endowment. The heart of compassion is possessed by all men alike; likewise the heart of shame, the heart of respect, and the heart of right and wrong. . . . Benevolence, dutifulness, observance of the rites, and wisdom are not welded on to me from the outside; they are in me originally. . . . There are cases where one man is twice, five times or countless times better than another man, but this is only because there are people who fail to make use of their native endowment�" (VI.A.6).

"�A great man need not keep his word nor does he necessarily see his action through to the end. He aims only at what is right�" (IV.B.11).

"�A great man is one who retains the heart of a new-born babe�" (IV.B.12).

"�Slight is the difference between man and the brutes. The common man loses this distinguishing feature, while the gentleman retains it.�" (IV.B.19).

4b14- way within oneself

"�A gentleman differs from other men in that he retains his heart. A gentleman retains his heart by means of benevolence and the rites�" (IV.B.28).

------------Seven-Storey Mountain-------------

"I have always tended to resist any kind of possessive affection on the part of another human being . . . And only with truly supernatural people have I ever felt really at my ease, really at peace. . . . [True love] did not burn you, it did not hold you, it did not try to imprison you in demonstrations, or trap your feet in the snares of its interest" (Merton Seven 57).

"sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. . . . Perhaps the inner motive is that the fact of being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we all need love from others, and depend upon the charity of others to carry on our own lives" (23).

"In the modern world, people are always holding up their heads and marching into the future, although they haven�t the slightest idea what they think the �future� is or could possibly mean" (Merton Seven 93).

* "I am sure that no one needs to be a saint to be a metaphysician. I dare say there are plenty of metaphysicians in hell" (Merton Seven 94).

"But when I read the works of William Penn and found them to be about as supernatural as a Montgomery Ward catalogue, I lost interest in the Quakers" (Merton Seven 116).

"Did I not know that my own sins were enough to have destroyed the whole of England and Germany? There has never been a bomb invented that is half as powerful as one mortal sin" (Merton Seven 128).

"It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce men and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could it all be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us?" (Merton Seven 128).

"the trouble with [Commmunist] convictions was that they were mostly strange, stubborn prejudices, hammered into their minds by the incantation of statistics, and without any solid intellectual foundation. And having decided that God is an invention of the ruling classes, and having excluded Him, and all moral order with Him, they were trying to establish some kind of a moral system by abolishing all morality in its very source. . . . They wanted to make everything right, and they denied all the criteria given us for distinguishing between right and wrong" (Merton Seven 146).

"Ultimately I suppose all Oriental mysticism can be reduced to techniques that [make one lose conscious awareness of parts of one�s body], but in a far more subtle and advanced fashion [than my lying in bed and trying to forget about my feet, then knees, etc]: and if that is true, it is not mysticism at all. It remains purely in the natural order. That does not make it evil, per se, according to Christian standards: but it does not make it good, in relation to the supernatural. It is simply more or less useless, except when it is mixed up with elements that are strictly diabolical" (Merton Seven 188).

"One of the reasons [Bramachari] gave us for the failure of any Christian missionaries to really strike deep into the tremendous populations of Asia was the fact that they maintained themselves on a social level that was too far above the natives. . . . For my own part, I see no reason for discouragement. Bramachari was simply saying something that has long been familiar to readers of the Gospels. Unless the grain of wheat, falling in the ground, die, itself remaineth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. The Hindus and not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves�and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them. There is no doubt in my mind that plenty of our missionaries are saints: and that they are capable of becoming greater saints too. And that is all that is needed. And, after all, St. Francis Xavier converted hundreds of thousands of Hindus in the sixteenth century and established Christian societies in Asia strong enough to survive for several centuries without any material support from outside the Catholic world" (Merton Seven 196-197).

"Why should anyone be shattered by the thought of hell? It is not compulsory for anyone to go there. Those who do, do so by their own choice, and against the will of God, and they can only get into hell by defying and resisting all the work of Providence and grace. It is their own will that takes them there, not God�s. In damning them, he is only ratifying their own decision�a decision which He has left entirely to their own choice" (Merton Seven 217).

"For although the will cannot force the intellect to see an object other than it ism it can turn it away from the object altogether, and prevent it from considering that thing at all" (Merton Seven 231).

* "�All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don�t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it�" (Merton Seven 238).

"There were still men on this miserable, noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude, who dwelt in forgotten mountain cells, in secluded monasteries, where the news and desires and appetites and conflicts of the world no longer reached them. They were free from the burden of the flesh�s tyranny, and their clear vision, clean of the world�s smoke and of its bitter sting, were raised to heaven and penetrated into the deeps of heaven�s infinite and healing light" (Merton Seven 316).

"The eloquence of this liturgy was even more tremendous: and what it said was one, simple, cogent, tremendous truth: this church, in the court of the Queen of Heaven, is the real capital of the country in which we are living. This is the center of all the vitality that is in America. This is the cause and reason why everything is holding together. These men, hidden in the anonymity of their choir and their white cowls, are doing for their land what no army, no congress, no president could ever do as such: they are winning for it the grace and the protection and the friendship of God" (Merton Seven 325).

"[T]he monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order, of union with God, the principle of all perfection. . . . The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else�s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!" (Merton Seven 330).

"I was free. I had recovered my liberty. I belong to God, not to myself: and to belong to Him is to be free, free of all the anxieties and worries and sorrows that belong to this earth, and the love of the things that are in it. What was the difference if you were in one place or another, if your life belonged to God, ad if you placed yourself completely in His hands? The only thing that mattered was the fact of the sacrifice, the essential dedication of one�s self, one�s will. The rest was only accidental" (Merton Seven 370).

"There is only one happiness: to please him. Only one sorrow, to be displeasing to Him, to refuse Him something, to turn away from Him, even in the slightest thing, even in thought, even in a half-willed movement of appetite: in these things, and these alone, is sorrow, in so far as they imply separation, or the beginning, the possibility of separation from Him Who is our life and all our joy. And since God is a Spirit, and infinitely above all matter and all creation, the only complete union possible, between ourselves and Him, is in the order of intention: a union of wills and intellects, in love, charity" (Merton Seven 370).

"So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom" (Merton Seven 372).

<<The reason why God doesn�t give more grace to individuals is that he knows it would only make people more hardened rather than bringing change in their hearts>>

-------No Man is an Island----------

"To love another is to will what is really good for him. Such love must be based on truth. A love that sees no distinction between good and evil, but loves blindly merely for the sake of loving, is hatred, rather than love. To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of love in our own souls" (Merton Island 1.3).

"It is clear then that to love others we must first love the truth. . . . The truth we must love in loving our brothers is the concrete destiny and sanctity that are willed for them by the love of God. . . . One who really loves another is not merely moved by the desire to see him contented and healthy and prosperous in this world. Love cannot be satisfied with anything so incomplete. If I am to love my brother, I must somehow enter deep into the mystery of God�s love for him" (Merton Island 1.5).

"A selfish love seldom respects the rights of the beloved to be an autonomous person. Far from respecting the true being of another and granting his personality room to grow and expand in its own original way, this love seeks to keep him in subjection to ourselves. It insists that he conform himself to us, and it works in every possible way to make him do so. . . . When we love thus, our friends exist only in order that we may love them. In loving them we seek to make pets of them, to keep them tame. Such love fears nothing more than the escape of the beloved" (Merton Island 1.8).

"There are some men who seem to think their acts are freer in proportion as they are without purpose, as if a rational purpose imposed some kind of limitation on us [but] . . . Without conscience, freedom never knows what to do with itself. And a rational being who does not know what to do with himself finds the tedium of life unbearable. He is literally bored to death. Just as love does not find its fulfillment merely in loving blindly, so freedom wastes away when it merely �acts freely� without any purpose. An act without purpose lacks something of the perfection of freedom, because freedom is more than a matter of aimless choice. It is not enough to affirm my liberty by choosing �something.� I must use and develop my conscience by choosing something good" (Merton Island 3.3,3.2).

* "God�s will is a profound and holy mystery, and the fact that we live our everyday lives engulfed in this mystery should not lead us to underestimate its holiness. We dwell in the will of God as in a sanctuary" (4.2).

"The man of right intentions makes a juridical offering of his work to God, and then plunges himself into the work, hoping for the best. For all his right intention he may well become completely dizzy in a maze of practical details. . . . The man of simple intention, because he is essentially a contemplative, works always in an atmosphere of prayer. . . . His spiritual resources are not all poured out into his work, but stored where they belong, in the depths of his being, with his God. He is detached from his work and from its results. Only a man who works purely for God can at the same time do a very good job and leave the results of the job to God alone. . . . A simple intention rests in God while accomplishing all things [while] . . . Our right intention passes from one particular end to another, from work to work, from day to day, from possibility to possibility. It reaches ahead into many plans. The works planned and done are all for the glory of God: but they stand ahead of us as milestones along a road with an invisible end. He is always �future,� even though He may be present. The spiritual life of a man of right intention is always more or less provisional. It is more possible than actual, for he always lives as if he had to finish just one more job before he could relax and look for a little contemplation" (Merton Island 4.17).

"When suffering comes to put the question, �Who are you?� we must be able to answer distinctly, and give our own name. By that I mean we must express the very depths of what we are, what we have become. All these things are sifted out of us by pain, and they are too often found to be in contradiction with one another" (Merton Island 5.5).

"A society whose whole idea is to eliminate suffering and bring all its members the greatest amount of comfort and pleasure is doomed to be destroyed. It does not understand that all evil is not necessarily to be avoided. Nor is suffering the only evil, as the world thinks.

If we consider suffering to be the greatest evil and pleasure the greatest good, we will live continually submerged in the only great evil that we ought to avoid without compromise: which is sin. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to face suffering, which is a lessor evil, in order to avoid or to overcome the greatest evil, sin.

What is the difference between physical evil�suffering�and moral evil�sin? Physical evil has no power to penetrate beneath the surface of our being [whereas] . . . Sin strikes at the very depth of our personality. . . . Physical evil is only to be regarded as a real evil insofar as it tends to foment sin in other souls" (Merton Island 5.8).

"The real purpose of asceticism is to disclose the difference between the evil use of created things, which is sin, and their good use, which is virtue. . . . But self denial should not make us forget the essential distinction between sin, which is a negation, and pleasure, which is a positive good. . . . We must, therefore, gain possession of ourselves, by asceticism, in order that we may be able to give ourselves to God" (Merton Island 6.9).

"Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestions of advertising and propaganda.

The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis. . . . [T]he whole reason for agitation is to hide the soul from itself, to camouflage its interior conflicts and their purposefulness, and to induce a false feeling that �we are getting somewhere.� Agitation�a condition of spirit that is quite normal in the world of business�is the fruit of tension in a spirit that is turning dizzily from one stimulus to another and trying to react to fifteen different appeals at the same time. Under the surface of agitation, and furnishing it with its monstrous and inexhaustible drive, is the force of fear or elemental greed for money, or pleasure, or power" (Merton Island 6.10).

"In order to defend ourselves against agitation, we must be detached not only from the immediate results of our work�and this detachment is difficult and rare�but from the whole complex of aims that govern our earthly lives. We have to detached from health and security, from pleasures and possessions, from people and places and conditions and things. We have to be indifferent to life itself, in the Gospel sense, living like the lilies of the field, seeking first the Kingdom of God and trusting that all our material needs will be taken care of in the bargain. How many of us can say, with any assurance, that we have even begun to live like this?

Lacking this detachment, we are subject to a thousand fears corresponding to our thousand anxious desires. Everything we love is uncertain: when we are seeking it, we fear we may not get it. When we have obtained it, we fear even more that it may be lost. Every threat to our security turns our work into agitation" (Merton Island 6.10).

"[W]hat we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul which is the principle of all our acts" (Merton Island 7.1).

"There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power" (Merton Island 7.4).

* "We cannot be ourselves unless we know ourselves. But self-knowledge is impossible when thoughtless and automatic activity keeps our souls in confusion. In order to know ourselves it is not necessary to cease all activity in order to think about ourselves. . . . We cannot begin to know ourselves until we can see the real reasons why we do the things we do, and we cannot be ourselves until our actions correspond to our intentions, and our intentions are appropriate to our own situation" (Merton Island 7.8).

"The relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to live as sons of God is not the twenty-four hour-a-day production of perfect acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God�s love have been overcome" (Merton Island 7.10).

"One who is content with what he has, and who accepts the fact that he inevitably misses very much in life, is far better off than one who has much more but who worries about all he may be missing. For we cannot make the best of what we are, if our hearts are always divided between what we are and what we are not. . . . One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us�whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need. Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the �one thing necessary� may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest" (Merton Island 7.9,10).

"Truth, in things, is their reality. In our minds, it is the conformity of our knowledge with the things known. In our words, it is the conformity of our words to what we think. In our conduct, it is the conformity of our acts to what we are supposed to be" (Merton Island 10.3).

"False sincerity has much to say, because it is afraid. True candor can afford to be silent. It does not need to face an anticipated attack. Anything it may have to defend can be defended with perfect simplicity.

The arguments of religious men are so often insincere, and their insincerity is proportion to their anger. Why do we get angry about what we believe? Because we do not really believe it. Or else what we pretend to be defending as the �truth� is really our own self-esteem. A man of sincerity is less interested in defending the truth than in stating it clearly, for he thinks that if the truth be clearly seen it can very well take care of itself" (Merton Island 10.8).

"There is no truth in pride. If our knowledge is true, then it ought to make us humble. If humble, then holy. . . . There is a way of knowing the truth that makes us true to ourselves and God, and, therefore, makes us more real and holier. But there is another way of receiving the truth that makes us untrue, unholy. . . . If my will acts as the servant of the truth, consecrating my whole soul to what the intelligence has seen, then I will be sanctified by the truth. I will be sincere. . . . But if my will takes possession of truth as its master, as if the truth were my servant, as if it belonged to me by right of conquest, then I will take it for granted that I can do with it whatever I please. This is the root of all falsity. The saint must see the truth as something to serve, not as something to own and manipulate according to his own good pleasure" (Merton Island 10.11).

"In the end, the problem of sincerity is a problem of love. A sincere man is not so much one who sees the truth and manifests it as he sees it, but one who loves the truth with a pure love. But truth is more than an abstraction. It lives and is embodied in men and things that are real. And the secret of sincerity is, therefore, not to be sought in a philosophical love for abstract truth but in a love for real people and real things�a love for God apprehended in the reality around us" (Merton Island 10.12).

On contraception: "The Church knows well that to frustrate the creative purpose of human generation is to confess a love that is insincere. It is insincere because it is less than human, even less than animal. Love that seek only to enjoy and not to create is not even a shadow of love. It has no power. . . . A love that fears to have children for any motive whatsoever is a love that fears love. It is a lie and a contradiction. The very nature of love demands that its own creative fulfillment should be sought in spite of every obstacle. Love, even human love, is stronger than death. Therefore, it is even more obvious that true love is stronger than poverty or hunger or anguish. And yet the men of our time do not love with enough courage to risk even discomfort or inconvenience.

Is it surprising that the Church should completely disregard all the economic arguments of those who think money and comfort are more important than love?" (Merton Island 10.12).

"We must accept the fact that with are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is. We must find our real self, in all its elemental poverty but also in its very great and very simple dignity: created to be a child of God, and capable of loving with something of God�s own sincerity and His unselfishness" (Merton Island 10.14).

"[T]here is no true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another�s solitude. I cannot be united in love with a person whose very personality my love tends to obscure, to absorb, and to destroy. . . . The beginning of this love [charity] is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Can this be charity? . . . [C]harity alone can give us the power and the delicacy to love others without defiling their loneliness which is their need and their salvation. . . . Secrecy and solitude are values that belong to the very essence of personality. A person is a person insofar as he has a secret and is a solitude of his own that cannot be communicated to anyone else. If I love a person, I will love that which most makes him a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of his own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand" (Merton Island 9.3,4; 15.1,3).

"It is at once our loneliness and our dignity to have an incommunicable personality that is ours, ours alone and no one else�s, and will be so forever" (Merton Island 15.5).

---------------Thoughts in Solitude-------------

"My hope is in what the eye has never seen. Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards. My hope is in what the heart of man cannot feel. Therefore let me not trust the feelings of my heart. My hope is in what the hand of man has never touched. Do not let me trust what I can grasp between my fingers. Death will loosen my grasp and my vain hope will be gone" (33).

"There is no neutrality between gratitude and ingratitude. Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything. Those who do not love, hate. In the spiritual life, there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate. . . . A man who truly responds to the goodness of God, and acknowledges all that he has received, cannot possibly be a half-hearted Christian. True gratitude and hypocrisy cannot exist together. They are totally incompatible. Gratitude of itself makes us sincere�or if it does not, then it is not true gratitude. . . . To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us�and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw in is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful man knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference" (35-37).

"Reading ought to be an act of homage to the God of all truth. We open our hearts to words that reflect the reality He has created or the greater Reality which He is. It is also an act of humility and reverence towards other men who are the instruments by which God communicated His truth to us" (62).

"Rest in God and rejoice, for this world is only the figure and the promise of a world to come, and only those who are detached from transient things can possess the substance of an eternal promise" (69).

"It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard. The words of the proud impose silence on all others, so that he alone may be heard" (100).

"Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all" (104-5).

"Many of our most cherished plans for the glory of God are only inordinate passion in disguise. And the proof of this is found in the excitement which they produce. The God of peace is never glorified by violence" (129).

"Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire" (Thoughts in Solitude).

�Compared with the doctrine of endless torment, every objection to Christianity sinks into insignificance.�

"Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so."

"Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to he reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure" (Mill 157).

"pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things . . . are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain" (158).

"no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. . . . It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they know only their own side of the question" (160-1).

"No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all it is possible to require, that happiness is a good" (Mill 192-3).

"If in ascribing goodness to God I do not mean what I mean by goodness; if I do not mean the goodness of which I have some knowledge, but an incomprehensible attitude of an incomprehensible substance, which for aught I know may be a totally different quality from that which I love and venerate . . . . To say that God�s goodness may be different in kind from man�s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good? To assert in words what we do not think in meaning, is as suitable a definition as can be given of a moral falsehood . . . . Unless I believe God to possess the same moral attributes which I find, in however inferior a degree, in a good man, what grounds of assurance have I of God�s veracity? . . . I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to heel for not so calling him, to hell I will go" (Carnell 306-307).

(from Native Realm, Berkeley: U of CA Press, 1968).

"If nature�s law is murder, if the strong survive and the weak perish, and it has been this way for millions and millions of years, where is there room for God�s goodness? . . . My favorites [heresies] were the Gnostics, the Manicheans, and the Albigensians. They at least different not take refuge behind some vague will of God in order to justify cruelty. They called necessity, which rules everything that exists in time, the work of an evil Demiurge opposed to God. God, separated in this way from the temporal order, subsisted in a sphere proper to himself, free from responsibility, as the object of our desires. Those desires grew purer as they turned more against the flesh, i.e. creation. . . .

The bitterness of dualism, the Absolute saved at this price, intoxicated me like the feel of a harsh surface after a smooth one that is impossible to grasp. The authors of the manual [on heresies] sharply condemned the debauchery practiced by certain Manichaeans as a �combating the flesh,� but their arguments never seemed convincing to me. I understood that psychic leap: if we are in the power of Evil, we should sin out of spite, immerse ourselves in it as deeply as possible in order to despise ourselves the more" (77-78).

"Nothing could stifle my inner certainty that a shining point exists where all lines intersect" (87).

"modern science is a Judeo-Christian creation" (89).

of Marxists in Poland: "dominated by the Hegelian conviction that certain phases will inevitable be victorious over others: that things are as they are, and we are not responsible" (127).

"when the Kingdom of God received the name of Communism, one had at least the consolation that an early �iron necessity� led up to it. By submitting to it�and it required murder, oppression, and torture�one brought the Great Day that much closer. . . . Such a shedding of responsibility easily turns into an abdication; and then the threshold beyond which an alleged necessity begins is very low. Evil is perpetrated without enthusiasm, but one does nothing to avoid it" (143-144).

"To kill a super-physical hunger, the best thing is a hike" (151).

"[The French revolt in thinking] was always a secure revolt because their bitterness and their nihilism rested on the tacit understanding that thought and action were measured by different standards: thought, even the most violent, did not offend custom. Any other nation, had it permitted itself such a dose of poison, would long ago ceased to exist; for France it was healthy. Only when carried to different soil did her slogans, books, and programs reveal their destructive force, among people who took the printed word literally" (164).

"Then there was my animal sexuality [in which the sexual] drive acts independently, without involving one�s whole being. . . . Through love affairs that were only an exchange of physiological factors, I practiced Manichaean purity, searching out women like myself, who were divided, ready to tumble into bed or on the grass with me and then return to an interrupted conversation as if the interval had been without significance. The greater the distance from the sexual act, the less attachment to it, the better. But such duality has a lot wrong with it. Because the drive is universal, its object is more or less a matter of indifference. . .. I yearned so strongly for a platonic love, for an intellectual brotherhood infinitely superior to the realm of fleshly compulsion. . . . [by] reducing sex to a thing that was not completely worthy of me (Lucifer, that proud and weightless spirit, is hostile to the body), I was deluding myself" (189-190).

"My new companions took refuge in subjective time through fornication, which both men and women considered an effective way of forgetting. But not all were satisfied with the ordinary forms of that activity; they searched for newer varieties. For instance, J. said to me that doing it in church was very pleasant. I guessed his motives: sexuality must be seasoned with evil; if all taboos vanish and there is nothing to break, it loses its appeal. J. was bored with the natural; he desired a prohibition, something to give mystery to sex to make it worthwhile" (209).

"Americans accepted their society as if it had arisen from the very order of nature; so saturated with it were they that they tended to pity the rest of humanity for having strayed from the norm. If I at least understood that all was not well with me, they did not realize that the opposite disablement affected them: a loss of the sense of history and, therefore, of a sense of the tragic, which is only born of historical experience. . . . that triumph of the individual wrought an inner sterility; they had souls of shiny plastic. Only the Negroes, obsessed like us . . . were alive, tragic, and spontaneous" (263).

"I was convinced that as long as we live, we must lift ourselves over new thresholds of consciousness; that to aim at higher and higher thresholds is our only happiness" (266).

"philosophy, despite the university departments, is not mere speculation; that it nourishes itself on everything within us and impregnates our whole being; and that if it does not help us to judge a man, a piece of sculpture, a literary work, it is dead" (266).

"woe to those who think that in the twentieth century they can save themselves without taking part in the tragedy, without purifying themselves through historical suffering" (267).

"there is no moral glory of what is irreversible. If there were, we would have to pay homage, for example, to that Mohammedan guard in a Stalinist jail who advised a Polish prisoner to sign what was asked of him, exclaiming: Allah dayet polozhenye!" [Allah gives the situation]. By this reasoning, Allah invested Stalin with power; therefore whoever respects Allah yields to power" (278).

"We Easterners, on the other hand, precisely because we had to gaze into the hells of our century, made the discovery that the elixir of youth is not a delusion. . . . . Through defeats and disasters, humanity searches for the elixir of youth; that is, of life made into thought, the ardor that upholds belief in the wider usefulness of our individual effort, even if it apparently changes nothing in the iron working of the world. . . . Yet only such an experience [tragedy] can whet our understanding, so that we see an old truth in a new light: when ambition counsels us to lift ourselves above simple moral rules guarded by the poor in spirit, rather than to choose them as our compass needle amid the uncertainties of change, we stifle the only thing that can redeem our follies and mistakes: love" (300).

"Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"

"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license"

"License they mean when they cry liberty"

"God left free the will; for what obeys

Reason is free, and reason he made right;�

But bid her well be ware, and still erect,

Lest by some fair-appearing good surprised,

She dictate false, and misinform the will

To do what God expressly hath forbid" ("Paradise Lost," IX, 351-356).

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav�n" ("Paradise Lost," I.263).

"Freely they [angels] stood who stood, and fell who fell,

Not free, what proof could they have giv�n sincere

Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love,

Where only what they needs must do, appear�d.

Not what they would? what praise could they receive?

What pleasure I from such obedience paid,

When Will and Reason (Reason also is choice)

Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil�d,

Made passive both, had serv�d necessity,

Not me. They therefore as right belong�d,

So were created, nor can justly accuse

Their maker, or their making, or their Fate;

As if Predestination over-rul�d

Their will, disposed by absolute Decree

Of high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed

Their own revolt not I: if I foreknew,

Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,

Which had no less prov�d certain unforeknown" ("Paradise Lost," III.102-119).

"That thou art happy, owe to God,

That thou continu�st such, owe to thyself,

That is, to thy obedience; therein stand.

This was that caution giv�n thee; be advised.

God made thee perfect, not immutable;

And good he made thee, but to prsevere

He left it in thy power, ordain�d thy will

By nature free, not overrul�d by Fate

Inextricable, or strict necessary;

Our voluntary service he requires

Not our necessitation, such with him

Finds no acceptance, nor can find, for how

Can hearts, not free, be tri�d whether they serve

Willing or no, who will but what they must

By destiny, and can no other choose?" ("Paradise Lost," V.520-535).

"firm they [angels] might have stood,

Yet fell; remember, and fear to transgress" ("Paradise Lost," VI.911-912).

"For God towards thee hath done his part, do thine" ("Paradise Lost," IX.375).

"�Nor love thy Life, nor hate; but what thou liv�st

Live well, how long or short permit to Heav�n�" ("Paradise Lost," XI.553-554).

"Peace to corrupt no less than War to waste" ("Paradise Lost," XI.784).

"Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King;
Which every wise and virtuous man attains:
And who attains not, ill aspires to rule
Cites of men, or headstrong Multitudes,
Subject himself to Anarchy within,
Or lawless passions in him which he serves.
But to guide Nations in the way of truth
By saving Doctrine, and from error lead
To know, and knowing worship God aright,
Is yet more Kingly, this attracts the Soul,
Governs the inner man, the nobler part,
That other o�er the body only reigns,
And oft by force, which to a generous mind
So reigning can be no sincere delight" (Paradise Regained II.466-480).

[Church of England published on sex and marriage:] "Once the sexual act is recognized as the means of declaring the deepest and most complete interchange of love, its significance can best be experienced and expressed in a lifelong commitment. Without this it has the potential to wound either or both partners, as for example, by arousing the expectations of love without the capacity or intention of fulfilling them. Even if this does not happen, the act itself is misused because it is made to express less than it fully symbolizes, so it is prevented from effecting what it naturally signifies. Within this total commitment (total, that is, within the capabilities of both partners) it can strengthen and enhance the very relationship which it expresses. Within the union of marriage it can release for the spouses unexpected reserves of energy, cure the inner loneliness of each, confirm and enhance their sexual identity. . . . Thus man and woman became �one flesh,� one organism, as it were, belonging to one another in such a way that without each other they are less than themselves. The Biblical phrase �one flesh� expresses a social and relational unit: in personal terms it does not mean that they lose their identities, or that one becomes a copy of the other, but rather that they complement each other: each needs the other to be himself or herself, and when divided from each other they are divided from themselves" (Montefiore, Reclaiming the High Ground, 14-15).

"Pantheism . . . is neither true nor false; it is something much worse, viz., entirely trivial. We had little doubt that the universe was here anyway; by giving it a new name (�God�) we explain nothing. We actually commit the venerable sin of Word Magic, wherein the naming of something is supposed to give added power either to the thing named or to the semantic magician himself" (Montgomery 22).

Liberal outlook: "that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad adeucation and bad institutions" (in McGrath 123).

Pre-millenialism: "I look at this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat, and said to me, �Moody, save all you can.� . . . The world is getting darker and darker; its ruin is coming nearer and nearer. If you have any friends on this wreck unsaved, you had better lose no time in getting them off" (Allan 50).

"The place for the ship is in the sea; but God help the ship if the sea gets into it" (in McGrath 50).

"Character is what a man is in the dark."

�Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.�

"We need not to be world travelers; we need not to be missionaries; no, we need not to be profound students of the Bible to be convinced that men need Christ. Look only into your own heart."

"The world-wide proclamation of the Gospel awaits accomplishment by a generation which shall have the obedience, courage, and determination to attempt the task."

"While life lasts, I am an evangelist."

�our entry into the Church�gives me, not so much exhilaration as a deep peace�A sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant� (Muggeridge Confessions 13).

�What, then, is a conversion? The question is like asking, �What is falling in love?� There is no standard procedure, no fixed time. Some, like the Apostle Paul, have Damascus Road experiences; I have often myself prayed for such a dramatic happening in my life that would, as it were, start me off on a new calendar, like from B.C. to A.D., and provide a watershed between carnal and spiritual love. Jesus� own image of a conversion is made clear in His conversation with Nicodemus, when he came to see Jesus by night � being born again. No such experience has been vouchsafed me; I have just stumbled on, like Bunyan�s pilgrim, falling into the Slough of Despond, locked up in Doubting Castle, terrified at passing through the valley of the Shadow of Death; from time to time, by God�s mercy, relieved of my burden of sin, but only, alas, soon to acquire it again� (Muggeridge Confessions 15-16).

�To put aside worldly ambition, lechery, the ego�s clamorous demands, what joy! To succumb, what misery!� (Muggeridge Confessions 39).

�Because of our physical hunger, we know there is bread; because of our spiritual hunger, we know there is Christ� (Muggeridge Confessions 42).

Inscription in the Lybian desert: �I, the Captain of a Legion of Rome, serving in the desert of Lybia, have learnt and pondered this truth: There are but two things to be sought, Love and Power, and no one has both� (Muggeridge Confessions 49).

�happiness that comes upon us�is as different from happiness sought or bought as is synthetic perfume from the fragrance of spring flowers. Of all the different purposes set before mankind, the most disastrous is surely �the Pursuit of Happiness.�� Happiness is like a young deer, fleet and beautiful. Hunt him, and he becomes a poor frantic quarry; after the kill, a piece of stinking flesh� (Muggeridge Confessions 55).

�the separation of the creative impulse from procreation, the downgrading of motherhood and the upgrading of spinsterhood , and the acceptance of sterile perversions as the equivalent of fruitful lust; finally in the grisly holocaust of millions of aborted babies, ironically in the name of quality of life� (Muggeridge Confessions 57).

�Never for an instant would I have envisaged humbly seeking admission to the most ancient, and � as I considered then, the most doctrinally dubious of all the contemporary churches, with the murkiest record� (Muggeridge Confessions 16).

�This inner, secret life has its ups and downs, its alternating states of ecstasy and despair. In its ecstatic mood it can flood one�s heart and the whole universe with light; in its despairing mood, darken all creation, oneself included� (Muggeridge Confessions 17).

�Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes; our has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite. Not Bolshevism�not Nazism�not Fascism�none of these, history will record, was responsible for bringing down the darkness on out civilization, but Liberalism. A solvent rather than a precipitate, a sedative rather than a stimulant, a slough rather than a precipice; blurring the edges of truth, the definition of virtue, the shape of beauty; a cracked bell, a mist, a death wish�� (Muggeridge Confessions 61).

�It is, indeed, among Christians themselves that the final decisive assault upon Christianity has been mounted. All they had to show was that when Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world, He meant that is was. Then, moving on from there, to stand all the other basic Christian propositions similarly on their heads. As, that to be carnally minded is life; that it is essential to lay up treasure on earth in the shape of a constantly expanding Gross National Product; that the flesh lusts with the spirit and the spirit with the flesh, so that we can do whatever we have a mind to; that he that loveth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. And so on�(Muggeridge Confessions 63).

�So the astronauts sour into the vast eternities of space, on earth the garbage piles higher; as the groves of acamede extend their domain, their alumni�s arms reach lower; as the phallic cult spreads, so does impotence. In great wealth, great poverty; in health, sickness; in numbers, deception. Gorgin, left hungry; sedated, left restless; telling all, hiding all; in flesh united, forever separate. So we press on through the valley of abundance that leads to the wasteland of satiety, passing through the gardens of fantasy; seeking happiness ever more ardently, and finding despair ever more surely� (Muggeridge Confessions 64).

�It is precisely when every earthy hope has been explored and found wanting, when every possibility of help from earthy sources has been sought and is not forthcoming, when every recourse this world offers, moral as well as material, has been drawn on and expended with no effect, when in the shivering cold every faggot has been thrown on the fire, and in the gathering darkness every glimmer of light has finally flickered out � it is then that Christ�s hand reaches out, sure and firm, that Christ�s words bring their inexhaustible comfort, that His light shines brightest, abolishing the darkness for ever� (Muggeridge Confessions 89-90).

�What is he doing, he asks himself, but filling in time? Bored here, he must go there; tired of such a person, he must cultivate some other person. So his life has no real meaning, it is spent wandering about the world, only to find that its variety is an illusion; that everywhere, everyone and everything endlessly recur� (Muggeridge Confessions 119).

�a dying civilization�clutches at any novelty in art and literature, ready to accept and then almost at once reject whatever is new, no matter how perverse or abnormal�. We continue to insist that change is progress, self-indulgence is freedom, and novelty is originality. In these circumstances it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Western man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down. Having convinced himself that he is too numerous, he labours with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer, thereby delivering himself the sooner into the hands of his enemies. At last having educated himself into imbecility and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct.� Muggeridge, The End of Christendom.

�Most were obviously standard twentieth-century pursuers of happiness for whom the Church of the Nativity was just an item in a sightseeing tour� (Muggeridge Confessions 130).

�I have always felt myself to be a stranger here on earth, aware that our home is elsewhere. Now, nearing the end of my pilgrimage, I have found a resting place in the Catholic Church from where I can see the Heavenly Gates built into Jerusalem�s Wall more clearly than from anywhere else, albeit if only through a glass darkly� (Muggeridge Confessions 134).

�[Mother Theresa] enjoys the inestimable advantage of never looking at TV, listening to radio or reading the newspapers, and so as a clear notion of what is really going on in the world; the siren-voice of the consensus does not reach her� (Muggeridge Confessions 137).

�Sex is the mysticism of a materialist society, with its own mysteries�that is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! And its own sacred texts and scripture�the erotica that fall like black atomic rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, blinding us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life! So we have ventured on, Little Flowers of D.H. Lawrence; our Aphrodites rising, bikinied and oiled, from Cote d�Azur beaches . . . until�cut! The switch is turned off, leaving the desolate, impenetrable night. Did I sometimes, staring sleepless into it, even then catch a glimpse, far, far away, of a remote shading of the black into gray? A miniscule intimation of a dawn that would break? You!�

"If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefferner."

"We have educated ourselves into imbecility."

"The divorcement of eroticism from its purpose, which is procreation, and its condition, which is lasting love, consequent upon the practice of artificial contraception, was proving increasingly disastrous to marriage and the family. . . . It was the Catholic Church's firm stand against contraception and abortion which finally made me decide to become a Catholic . . . The Church's stand is absolutely correct. It is to its eternal honour that it opposed contraception, even if the opposition failed. I think, historically, people will say it was a very gallant effort to prevent a moral disaster" (Muggeridge).

"It�s a good thing to have an open mind�but not so open that your brains fall out."

"I cannot understand those who treat the proposition �There may be a God� with the same indifference with which they would treat the proposition �A murder has just been committed in Japan.�"

"If children, if the poor, if the busy, can have true faith, yet cannot weigh evidence, evidence is not the simple foundation on which faith if built" (in Grammar 5).

"It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing"

"When men understand what each other mean, they see, for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless"

�Unlearn Catholicism, and you become Protestant, Unitarian, Deist, Pantheist, sceptic, in a dreadful, but infallible succession; only not infallible, by some accident of your position, of your education, and of your cast of mind� (John Henry Cardinal Newman, "Mysteries of Nature and of Grace," in _Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations_ (London, 1849), p. 298.)

�There is but one Voice for whose decisions the people wait with trust, one Name and one See to which they look with hope, and that name Peter, and that See Rome� (Newman in Buckley Nearer, My God 48).

�Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge to contend with those giants, the passion and the pride of man� (Allitt 79).

�If the Roman Catholic Church is not the Church of Christ, there never was a Church established by Him."

�From the time I became a Catholic, I have been at perfect peace and contentment. It was like coming into port after a rough sea.�

"I have not had one moment's wavering of trust in the Catholic Church ever since I was received into her fold. I have no intention, and never had any intention, of leaving the Catholic Church and becoming a Protestant again. And I hereby profess with an absolute internal assent and consent that the thought of an Anglican service makes me shiver, and the thought of the Thirty-Nine Articles makes me shudder. Return to the Church of England! No! I should be a consummate fool (to use a mild term) if in my old age I left 'the land flowing with milk and honey' for the city of confusion and the house of bondage."

�ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.�

"I had been deceived greatly once; how could I be sure I was not deceived a second time? I then thought myself right; how was I to be certain that I was right now?" (Apologia, p. 310)

"Surely then, if the revelations and lessons in Scripture are addressed to us personally and practically, the presence among us of a formal judge and standing expositor of its words, is imperative. It is antecedently unreasonable to suppose that a book so complex, so unsystematic, in parts so obscure, the outcome of so many minds, times, and places, should be given us from above without the safeguard of some authority; as if it could possibly, from the nature of the case, interpret itself. Its inspiration does but guarantee its truth, nor its interpretation. How are private readers satisfactorily to distinguish what is didactic and what is historical, what is fact and what it vision, what is allegorical and what is literal, what is idiomatic and what is grammatical, what is enunciated formally and what occurs obiter, what is only of temporary and what is of lasting obligation? Such is our natural anticipation, and it is only too exactly justified in the events of the last three centuries, in the man countries where private judgment on the text of Scripture has prevailed. The gift of inspiration requires as its complement the gift of infallibility" (in Keating 127-28).

"religious minds embrace the Gospel mainly on the great antecedent probability of a revelation, and the suitableness of the Gospel to their needs" (Univ Sermons 197 in Gundersen 70).

"A mutilated and defective evidence suffices for persuasion where the heart is alive" (Univ Sermons 200 in Gundersen 88).

"The best illustration of what I hold is that of a cable, which is made up of a number of separate threads, each feeble, yet together as sufficient as an iron rod. An iron road represents mathematical or strict demonstration; a cable represents moral demonstration, which is an assemblage of probabilities, separately insufficient for certainty, but, when put together, irrefragable. A man who said, �I cannot trust a cable, I must have an iron bar,� would in certain given cases, be irrational and unreasonable:�so too is a man who says I must have a rigid demonstration, not moral demonstration of religious truth" (in Gundersen 71).

"the contention [is] that these doctrines [Apostolic succession of bishops, Eucharist as sacrifice] are not plainly contained in Scripture and may not indeed be in the Bible at all. I concede, goes the reply, that these doctrines are not to be found in the letter of scripture or on its surface. But this is just as true of other doctrines you an orthodox Protestant believe quite firmly; such doctrines as, let us say, the Godhead of the Holy Spirit or that Holy Scripture contains all that is sufficient for salvation . . . . It seems to me that you ought in consistency to believe less than you do or more than you do. If you confine yourself to what is contained in scripture then the content of your belief will be thin and even incoherent and you will have no rationale for giving the Bible the supreme position. What you do, inconsistently, believe . . . is a warrant for your going further and adopting as your criterion the tradition of the first few centuries and using this tradition, embodied in the formularies of the Church, as that is the light of which Scripture is to be read and understood. You must either move upwards into Catholicism or downwards into unbelief. There is no midway point of rest" (Keating 151-52).

"It is quite evident that this passage [2 Tim 3:16] furnishes no argument whatever that the Sacred Scripture, without Tradition, is the sole rule of faith; for, although Sacred Scripture is profitable for these four ends, still it is not said to be sufficient. The Apostle requires the aid of Tradition (2 Thes 2:15). Moreover, the Apostle here refers to the Scriptures which Timothy was taught in his infancy. Now, a good part of the New Testament was not even written in his boyhood: some of the Catholic epistles were not written even when St. Paul wrote this, and none of the Books of the New Testament were then placed on the canon of the Scripture books. He refers, then, to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and if the argument from this passages proved anything, it would proved too much, viz., that the Scriptures of the New Testament were not necessary for a rule of faith" (in Keating 135-36).

"the character of facts is not changed because they are incorrectly reported; distance of time and space only does injury to the record of them. . . . [A] fact is not disproved, because it is not proved; ten thousand occurrences are ever passing, which leave no record behind them, and do not cease to have been because they are forgotten. . . . In estimating statements of fact, it is usual to allow that various occurrences may be all true, which rest upon very different degrees of evidence. . . . How can things depend on our knowledge of them? . . . Yet it does not appear how this �unsatisfactory manner� in the report can touch the events reported; if they took place, they were before and quite independent of the evidence at present existing for them, be it greater of less; our knowledge or ignorance does nor create or annihilate facts" (Newman Miracles 173-74, 177, 179, 183).

--------Development-------

"It is in point to notice also the structure and style of Scripture, a structure so unsystematic and various, and a style so figurative and indirect, that no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not" (Newman Development 71)

"The Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this. . . . [T]o be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant" (Development 7-8).

"either an objective revelation has not been given, or it has been provided with means for impressing its objectiveness on the world" (Development 90 in Gundersen 86).

"[If the order of nature is once broken by the introduction of a revelation, which is a fact,] the continuance of that revelation is but a question of degree; and the circumstance that a work has begun makes it more probable than not that it will proceed. We have no reason to suppose that there is so great a distinction between ourselves and the first generation of Christians, as that they had a living infallible guidance, and we have not" (Development 85 in Gundersen 86-87).

"[The principle of faith in Christianity stipulates] That belief in Christianity is in itself better than unbelief; that faith, though an intellectual action, is ethical in its origin; that it is safer to believe; that we must begin by believing; that as for the reasons of believing, they are for the most part implicit, and need be but slightly recognized by the mind that is under their influence; that they consist moreover rather of presumptions and ventures after truth than of accurate and complete proofs; and that probable arguments, under the scrutiny and sanction of a prudent judgment, are sufficient for conclusions which we even embrace as most certain, and turn to the most important uses" (Newman Development 327).

"It does not seem to have struck him [Locke] that our �by-end� may be the desire to please our Maker, and that the defect of scientific proof may be made up to our reason by our love of Him. It does not seem to have struck him that such a philosophy as his cut off from the possibility and the privilege of faith are all but the educated few, all but the learned, the clear-headed, the men of practiced intellects and balanced minds, men who had leisure, who had opportunities of consulting others, and kind and wise friends to whom they deferred. How could a religion ever be Catholic, if it was to be called credulity or enthusiasm in the multitude to use those ready instruments of belief, which alone Providence had put in their power . . . [The Fathers] held that men were not obliged to wait for logical proof before believing; on the contrary, that the majority were to believe first on presumptions and let the intellectual proof come as their reward" (Newman Development 330).

"The truth of our religion, like the truth of common matters, is to be judged by all the evidence taken together" (Development 108 in Gundersen 68).

"Supposing there be otherwise good reason for saying that the Papal Supremacy is part of Christianity [�It is the absolute need of a monarchical power in the Church which is our ground for anticipating it. A political body cannot exist without government, and the larger is the body, the more concentrated must the government be. If the whole of Christendom is to form one Kingdom, one head is essential; at least this is the experience of eighteen hundred years�], there is nothing in the early history of the Church to contradict it. . . . In course of time, first the power of the Bishop displayed itself, and then the power of the Pope. . . . Christians at home did not yet quarrel with Christians abroad; they quarreled at home among themselves. . . . first local disturbances gave exercise to Bishops, and next ecumenical disturbances gave exercise to Popes; and whether communion with the Pope was necessary for catholicity would not and could not be debated until a suspension of that communion had actually occurred. . . . [I]t is a less difficulty that the Papal supremacy was not formally acknowledged in the second century, than that there was no formal acknowledgement on the part of the Church of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity till the fourth" (Newman Development 154, 151).

"Carnal minds will ever create a carnal worship for themselves; and to forbid them the service of the Saints will have no tendency to teach them the worship of God" (Newman Development 428).

"Time is short, eternity is long" (Development 445).

Gundersen: "Disregard for private judgment does not mean religious tyranny, no does it hinder personal inquiries, for the function of an external authority is to preserve the objectiveness of Revelation, not to enforce belief in certain doctrines, which is a private matter" (87).

Gundersen: "If God had been so merciful as to provide a revelation at all, he would also have provided it with a safeguard against corruption" (86).

Gundersen: "Those who reject external authority in matters of faith and maintain that Christian truth must be attained only by personal effort, have to prove that every individual, whatever be his mental equipment, possesses sufficient means to find truth, or they have taken religion away from the domain of truth which leaves the question of evidences without any meaning at all" (Gundersen 87, summary of Development 82-83).

------Apologia--------

"the history of St. Leo showed me that the deliberate and eventual consent of the great body of the Church ratified a doctrinal decision as a part of revealed truth, it also showed that the rule of Antiquity was not infringed, though a doctrine had not been publicly recognized as so revealed until centuries after the time of the Apostles. Thus, whereas the Creeds tell us that the Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, I could not prove that the Anglican communion was an integral part of the One Church, on the ground of its teaching being Apostolic or Catholic, without reasoning in favor of what are commonly called the Roman corruptions; and I could not defend our separation from Rome and her faith without using arguments prejudicial to those great doctrines concerning our Lord, which are the very foundation of the Christian religion" (Apologia 142-43).

"Granting that the Roman (special) doctrines are not found drawn out in the early Church, yet I think there is sufficient trace of them in it, to recommend and prove them on the hypothesis of the Church having a divine guidance, though not sufficient to prove them of itself. So that the question simply turns on the nature of the promise of the Spirit, made to the Church" (Apologia 181).

"The analogy of the Old Testament, and also of the New, leads to an acknowledgment of doctrinal developments" (Apologia 181).

"I was led on to examine more attentively what I doubt not was in my thoughts long before, viz. the concatenation of argument by which the mind ascends from its first to its final religious idea; and I came to the conclusion that there was no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the other. And I hold this still: I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in a God; and if I am asked why I believe in a God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I feel it impossible to believe in my own existence (and of that fact I am quite sure) without believing also in the existence of Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being in my conscience" (Apologia 182). . . . "I say, that I believed in a God on a ground of probability, and that I believed in Christianity on a probability, and that I believed in Catholicism on a probability, and that these three grounds of probability, distinct from each other of course in subject matter, were still all of them one and the same in nature of proof, as being probabilities" (183).

"From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know of no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact of a father as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being" (Apologia 61).

"[The Catholic Church] holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremeest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, . . . or steal one poor farthing without excuse" (Cardinal Newman Apologia 221).

"[The Church] may be called a large reformatory or training school . . . [a] moral factory, for the melting, refining, and molding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes" (Apologia 226).

"He who has made us has so willed, that in mathematics indeed we should arrive at certitude by rigid demonstration, but in religious inquiry we should arrive at certitude by accumulated probabilities" (Apologia 199 in Gundersen 70).

"Were it not for this voice [conscience], speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist . . . [It] take[s] away the winter of my desolation, [and] make[s] the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice" (Apologia 216).

"If I looked into a mirror and did not see my face, I should have the same sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflection of its creator" (Apologia 216).

"since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God. And now, supposing it were the blessed and loving will of the Creator to interfere in this anarchical condition of things, what are we to suppose would be the methods which might be necessarily or naturally involved in His purpose of mercy? Since the world is in so abnormal a state, surely it would be no surprise to me, if the interposition were of necessity equally extraordinary�or what is called miraculous" (Apologia 217-18). . . . "Supposing then it to be the Will of the Creator to interfere in human affairs, and to make provisions for retaining in the world a knowledge of Himself, so definite and distinct as to be proof against the energy of human skepticism, in such a case,�I am far from saying that there was no other way,�but there is nothing to surprise the mind, if He should think fit to introduce a power into the world invested with the prerogative of infallibility in religious maters. Such a provision would be a direct, immediate, active, and prompt means of withstanding the difficulty; it would be an instrument suited to the need; and, when I find that this is the claim of the Catholic Church, not only do I find no difficulty in admitting the idea, but there is a fitness in it, which recommends it to my mind. And thus I am brought to speak of the Church�s infallibility, as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve religion in the world, and to restrain the freedom of thought, which of course in itself is one of the greatest of our natural gifts, and to rescue it from its own suicidal excesses" (Apologia 219-220).

------Idea of a University------

"[D]eduction only is the instrument of theology. There the simple question is, What is revealed? all doctrinal knowledge flows from one fountainhead. If we are able to enlarge our view and multiply our propositions, it must be merely by the comparison and adjustment of existing truths; if we would solve new questions, it must be by consulting old answers. The notion of doctrinal knowledge absolutely novel, and of simple addition from without, is intolerable to our ears, and never was entertained by anyone who was even approaching an understanding of our creed. . . . What is known in Christianity is just what has been revealed, and nothing more; certain truths, communicated directly from above, are committed to the keeping of the faithful, and to the very last nothing can really be added to those truths. From the time of the Apostles to the end of the world no strictly new truth can be added to the theological information which the Apostles were inspired to deliver. It is possible of course to make numberless deductions from the original doctrines; but as the conclusion is ever in its premises, such doctrines are not, strictly speaking, an addition" (Idea of a University 223, 440-442 in Gundersen 73).

"The old Catholic notion, which still lingers in the Established Church, was, that Faith was an intellectual act, its object truth, and its result knowledge. . . . but in proportion as the Lutheran leaven spread, it became fashionable to say that Faith was, not an acceptance of revealed doctrine, not an act of the intellect, but a feeling, an emotion, an affection, an appetency" (Idea of a University in Gundersen 39).

-------Grammar of Assent----------

Reply to Paine ["a revelation, which is to be received as true, ought to be written on the sun"]: "Till these last centuries, the Visible Church was, at least to her children, the light of the world, as conspicuous as the sun in the heavens . . . [This Church alone has the gift of healing sin,] the one deep wound of human nature,. . . and therefore it must last while human nature lasts. It is a living truth which never can grow old" (Grammar of Assent 378, 487 in Gundersen 83).

"Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof. We shall ever be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences, and divines into textuaries. We shall never get at our first principles. Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyze your elements, sinking farther and farther, and finding in the lowest depth of a lower deep, till you come to the broad bosom of skepticism. I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral governance from the physical world. Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith" (Grammar 94-95 in Gundersen 98).

"[to lay down] as a general proposition that we have no right in philosophy to make any assumption whatever, and that we ought to begin with a universal doubt�This, (however), is of all assumptions the greatest, and to forbid assumptions universally is to forbid this one in particular. Doubt itself is a positive state, and implies a definite habit of mind, and thereby necessarily involves a system of principles and doctrines of its won. Again, if nothing is to be assumed, what is our very method of reasoning but as assumption? and what our nature itself?" (Grammar of Assent 377 in Gundersen 103-104).

"The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion. . . . [I]nstances and patterns, not logical reasonings, are the living conclusions which alone have a hold over the affections or can form the character" (Newman Grammar 89, 92).

"Take another virtual exhibition of fear; I mean irritation and impatience of contradiction, vehemence of assertion, determination to silence others,�these are the tokens of a mind that has not yet attained the tranquil enjoyment of certitude. . . . Those who are certain of a fact are indolent disputants; it is enough for them that they have the truth; and they have little disposition, except at the call of duty, to criticize the hallucinations of others, and much less are they angry at their positiveness or ingenuity in argument; but to call names, to impute motives, to accuse of sophistry, to be impetuous and overbearing, is the part of men who are alarmed for their own position, and fear it to be approached too nearly" (Newman Grammar 165-166).

"that religion is an integral part of our nature, and that Catholicism alone adequately fulfils the expectation of a revelation which natural religion raises" (Grammar 501n in Gundersen 93).

* "we pick our way, slowly perhaps, but surely, into the One Religion which God has given, taking our certitudes with us, not to lose, but to keep them more securely, and to understand and love their objects more perfectly" (Grammar 201).

"One of the most important effects of Natural Religion on the mind, in preparation for Revealed, is the anticipation which it creates, that a Revelation will be given. . . . Those who know nothing of the wounds of the soul, are not led to deal with the question . . . [Natural religion teaches] on the one hand, the infinite goodness of God, and, on the other, of our own extreme misery and need . . . It is difficult to put a limit on the legitimate force of this antecedent probability. Some minds will feel it to be so powerful, as to recognize in it almost a proof, without direct evidence, of the divinity of a religion claiming to be true, supposing its history and doctrine are free of positive objection, and there be no rival religion with plausible claims of its own. . . . Men are too well inclined to sit at home, instead of stirring themselves to inquire whether a revelation has been given; they expect its evidences to come to them without their trouble; they act, not as suppliants, but as judges. Modes of argument such as Paley�s [similar to mine in the lecture notes], encourage this state of mind; they allow men to forget that revelation is a boon, not a debt, n the part of the Giver; they treat it as a mere historical phenomenon. . . . Like this is the conduct of those who resolve to treat the Almighty with dispassionateness, a judicial temper, clear-headedness, and candor. It is the way which such men, (surely not a good way,) to say, that without these lawyerlike qualifications conversion is immoral. It is their way, a miserable way, to pronounce that there is no religious love of truth where there is fear of error. On the contrary, I would maintain that the fear of error is simply necessary to the genuine love of truth. No inquiry comes to good which is not conducted under a deep sense of responsibility, and of the issues depending upon its determination" (Grammar 328-329,330,331).

Newton

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"

"to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me"

"If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only stop creating a devotion to abstract ideals which everyone accepts in theory and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization. That immediately gives his ministry a touch of reality and potency" (in McGrath 129).

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in an immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love."

"Man�s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man�s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

"When you fight a monster, beware lest you become a monster."

"A new commandment I give you: Be hard."

"He who no longer finds what is great in God must find it nowhere. He must either deny it or create it."

"The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and meaningless has made the world ugly and meaningless." (130)

"Oh man! Take heed of what the dark midnight says:
I slept, I slept�from deep dreams I awoke:
The world is deep�and more profound than day would have thought.
Profound in her pain�
Pleasure�more profound than pain of heart,
Woe speaks; pass on.
But all pleasure seeks eternity�
a deep and profound eternity" (in Schaeffer Vol 5, p.193-194).

"There will be wars, such as have never been waged on earth. I foresee something terrible, Chaos everywhere. Nothing left which is of any value; nothing which commands: Thou shalt."

"All purely moral demands without their religious basis must needs end in nihilism."

"I do not wish to live again. How have I borne life? By creating. What has made me endure? The vision of the Ubermensh who affirms life. I have tried to affirm life myself�but ah!" (diary; contrast with 324)

"My life is now comprised in the wish that the truth about all things be different from my way of seeing it: if only someone would convince me of the improbability of my truths!" (several years before he went insane).

"Oh grant madness, you heavenly powers! Madness that I at last may believe in myself. . . . I am consumed by doubts, for I have killed the Law. . . . If I am not more than the Law, then I am the most abject [low in spirit or hope] of all men." (spoken by an imaginary titanic genius)

"I perform the great experiment: Who can bear the idea of the Eternal recurrence? . . . Let us consider this idea in its most terrifying form: existence, as it is, without meaning or goal, but inescapable, recurrent, without a finale into nothingness. . . . Those who cannot bear the sentence, There is no salvation, ought to perish."

"[Christianity] has turned the world into a hospital in which everyone is sick" (326)

"I teach you the superman. Man is something to be overcome" (Thus Spake Zarathustra).

"Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual" (Gay Science).

"Whither is God?" [the madman] cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him. . . . What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up and down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not fell the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? . . . God is dead . . . And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, para.124).

�In Germany�they know why they are Protestants. I never knew an Englishman who did, and if he does, he becomes a Catholic!� (Allitt 59).

"I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception" (Novalis).

�The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet� Robert Oppenheimer.

"The question is not about isolated �miracles,� but about the whole conception of Christianity . . . Is there a supernatural Being�God? Is there a supernatural government of the world? Is there a supernatural relation of God and man . . . ? Is there a supernatural revelation? Has that revelation culminated in a supernatural Person�Christ? Is there a supernatural work in the souls of men? Is there a supernatural redemption? Is there a supernatural hereafter?" (Orr, A Christian View of God and the World, 244).

"Whoever controls the past controls the future."

"I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse"

Sin: "Not that in every point man is as bad as he could be, but that in every point man is not as good as he should be."

"the faith which receives Christ for justification is itself the free gift of a sovereign God, bestowed by spiritual regeneration in the act of effectual calling" (Luther 58).

"to rely on oneself for faith is no different in principle from relying on oneself for works, and the one is as un-Christian and anti-Christian as the other" (Luther 59). It protests against a picture of God and humans as parties coming on nearly-equal terms, both with a contribution to make, and both dependent on the other for the salvation�a picture in which "God exists for man�s convenience rather than man for God�s glory" (Luther Bondage 60).

"Pelagianism is bad enough, for it tells us that we are able to earn our salvation, and this is to flatter man; but semi-Pelagianism is worse, for it tells us we need hardly do anything to earn our salvation, and that is to belittle salvation and to insult God" (Luther Bondage 50).

"There is such a thing as knowledge. The assertion of this proposition is necessary true if there is to be any assertion at all, for its contradictory is self-contradictory. If the assertion �There is no knowledge� is true, then it is false, for that assertion itself purports to be an instance of knowledge. Thus the only alternative to the recognition of the existence of knowledge is, as Aristotle said, to return to the vegetative state where no assertions can be made" (Smith 131).

"The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first" (Pense�s).

* "this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself. God alone is man�s true good, and since man abandoned him is is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take his place" (148).

* "�Men, it is in vain that you seek within yourselves the cure for all your miseries. All your intelligence can only bring you to realize that it is not within yourselves that you will find either truth or good�" (Pensees 149).

"When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing" (Pensees 347).

* "Then Jesus Christ comes to tell men that they have no enemies but themselves" (433).

"If we submit everything to reason, our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous. . . It is right then, that reason should submit when it judges that it ought to submit. . . There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason [to determine Truth]. . . Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason . . . Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them. . . Reason�s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it."

"Without doubt nothing is more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has implicated in its guilt men so far from the original sin that they seem incapable of sharing it. This flow of guilt does not seem merely impossible to us, but indeed most unjust. What could be more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than the eternal damnation of a child, incapable of will, for an act in which he seems to have so little part that it was actually committed 6,000 years before he existed? Certainly nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet, but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible to ourselves. . . . it is harder to conceive of man without this mystery than for man to conceive of it himself" (131).

"The heart has its reasons which the reason cannot know"

"Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed"

"Any man can do what Mohomet did. For he performed no miracles and was not foretold. No man can do what Christ did" (321).

The Wager: "God is or he is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason cannot decide it at all. There is an infinite chaos that separates us. . . . [B]ut you must wager: this is not voluntary, you are embarked. Which will you take then? Let us see. . . . Your reason is not more wounded, since a choice must necessarily be made, in choosing one rather than the other. . . . if you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then that he is, without hesitation . . . [for] there is an eternity of life and happiness [potentially at stake]" (Carnell 357-358).

-----Beginnings-------

* "There are only three sorts of people: those who have found God and serve him; those who are busy seeking him and have not found him; and those who live without either seeking or finding him. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy, those in the middle are unhappy and reasonable" (160).

* "A man in a dungeon, not knowing whether sentence has been passed on him, only with an hour left to find out, and that hour enough, once he knows it has been passed, to have it revoked. It would be unnatural for him to spend that hour not finding out whether sentence has been passed but playing piquet. . . . So it is not only the zeal of those who seek him that proves God�s existence, but also the blindness of those who do not seek him" (163).

* "Imagine a number of men in chains, all under the sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition" (434).

* "It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal" (164).

* "Thus our chief interest and chief duty is to seek enlightenment on this subject [the immortality of the soul], on which all our conduct depends. And that is why, amongst those who are not convinced, I make an absolute distinction between those who strive with all their might to learn and those who live without troubling themselves or thinking about it.

I can feel nothing but compassion fot those who sincerely lament their doubt, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing no effort to escape from it, make their search their principal and most serious business.

But as for those who spend their lives without a thought for this final end of life and who, because they do not find within themselves the light of conviction, neglect to look elsewhere, and to examine thoroughly whether this opinion is one of those which people accept out of credulous simplicity or one of those which, though obscure in themselves, none the less have a most solid and unshakeable foundation: as for them, I view them very differently.

This negligence in a matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity; it astounds and appalls me; it seems quite monstrous to me. . . .

One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity.

Nothing could be more real, or more dreadful than that. Let us put on as bold a face as we like: that is the end awaiting the world�s most illustrious life. Let us ponder these things, and then say whether it is not beyond doubt that the only good thing in this life is the hope of another life, that we become happy only as we come nearer to it, and that, just as no more unhappiness awaits those who have been quite certain of eternity, so there is no happiness for those who have no inkling of it. . . .

so the doubter who does not seek is at the same time very unhappy and very wrong. If in addition he feels a calm satisfaction, which he openly professes, and even regards as a reason for joy and vanity, I can find no terms to describe so extravagant a creature.

What can give rise to such feelings? What reason for joy can be found in the expectation of nothing but helpless wretchedness? What reason for vanity in being plunged into impenetrable darkness? And how can such an argument as this occur to a reasonable man?

�I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am terribly ignorant about everything. I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects about everything and about itself, and does not know itself any better than it knows anything else.

�I see the terrifying spaces of the universe hemming me in, and I find myself attached to one corner of this vast expanse without knowing why I have been put in this place rather than that, or why the brief span of life allotted to me should be assigned to one moment rather than another of all the eternity which went before me and all that which will come after me. I see only infinity on every side, hemming me in like an atom or like the shadow of a fleeting instant. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least about is this very death which I cannot evade.

�Just as I do not know whence I come, so I do not know whither I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall for ever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, but I do not know which of these two states is to be my eternal lot. Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And my conclusion from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of seeking what is to happen to me. Perhaps I might find some enlightenment in my doubts, but do not want to take the trouble, nor take a step to look for it: and afterwards, as I sneer at those who are striving to this end � (whatever certainty they have should arouse despair rather than envy) �I will go without fear or foresight to face so momentous an event, and allow myself to be carried off limply to my death, uncertain of my future state for all eternity.�

Who would wish to have as a friend a man who argued like that? Who would choose him from among others as a confidant in his affairs? Who would resort to him in adversity? To what use in life could he possibly be turned?

It is truly glorious for religion to have such unreasonable men as enemies: their opposition represents so small a danger that it serves on the contrary to establish the truths of religion. For the Christian faith consists almost wholly in establishing these two things: The corruption of nature and the redemption of Christ. Now I maintain that if they do not serve to prove the truth of the redemption by the sanctity of their conduct, they do at least as admirably serve to prove the corruption of nature by such unnatural sentiments. . . .

[T]he same man who spends so many days and nights in fury and despair at losing some office or at some imaginary affront to his honor is the same one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death but feels neither anxiety nor emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest. It is an incomprehensible spell, a supernatural torpor . . ." (427).

"[Metaphysical proofs] are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact, and, even if they did help some people, it would be only for the moment during which they watched the demonstration, because an hour later they would be afraid they had made a mistake" (190).

"I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding our Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true" (387).

* "The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw dirt over your head and it is finished for ever" (165).

"Man does not know the place he should occupy. He has obviously gone astray; he has fallen from his true place and cannot find it again. He searches everywhere, anxiously but in vain, in the midst of impenetrable darkness" (400).

"We desire truth but find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness. We have been left with this desire as much as a punishment as to make us feel how far we have fallen" (401).

"Solomon and Job have spoken best about man�s wretchedness, one the happiest, the other the unhappiest of men; one knowing by experience the vanity of pleasure, and the other the reality of afflictions" (403).

* "I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek with groans" (405).

----Wretchedness/Diversion

"When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will becomes of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. . . . Then these lost and wretched creatures look around and find some attractive object to which they become addicted and attached" (198).

"Such is our true state. That is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge or absolute ignorance. We are floating is a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. That is our natural state and yer the most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire for a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens up into the depth of the abyss" (199).

"We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the pas as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. . . . Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so" (47).

* "If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it" (70).

* "We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it" (166).

* "Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so we can talk about it" (77).

"The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leas us imperceptibly to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death" (414).

* "Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things" (133).

* "I have often said that the sole cause of a man�s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room" (136).

"Imagine any situation you like, ask up all the blessings with which you could be endowed, to be king is still the finest thing in the world; yet if you imagine one with all the advantages of his rank, but no means of diversion, left to ponder and reflect on what he is, this limp felicity will not keep him going; he is bound to start thinking of all the threats facing him, of possible revolts, finally of inescapable death and disease, with the result that if he is deprived of so-called diversion he is unhappy indeed more unhappy then the humblest of his subjects who can enjoy sport and diversion.

The only good thing for men therefore is to be diverted from thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their mind off of it, or by some novel and agreeable passion which keeps them busy, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show, in short by what is called diversion.

That is why gaming and feminine society, war and high office are so popular. It is not that they really bring happiness, nor that anyone imagines that true bliss comes from possessing the money to be won at gaming or the hare that is hunted: no one would take it as a gift. What people want is not the easy, peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture.

That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment; that is why the pleasures of solitude are so incomprehensible. That, is fact, is the main joy of being a king, because people are constantly trying to divert him and procure him every kind of pleasure. . . .

The hare itself would not save us from thinking about death and the miseries distracting us, but hunting it does so. . . .

It is wrong then to blame then; they are not wrong to want excitement�if they only wanted it for the sake of diversion. The trouble is that they want it as though, once they had the things they seek, they could not fail to be truly happy. That is what justifies calling their search a vain one. . . . They do not know that all they want is the hunt and not the capture. . . . They think they genuinely want rest when all they really want is activity.

They have a secret instinct driving them to seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness. They have another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original nature, telling them that the only true happiness lies in rest and not excitement. These two contrary instincts give rise to a confused plan buried out of sight in the depths of the soul, which leads them to seek rest by way of activity and always to imagine that the satisfaction they miss will come to them once they overcome certain obvious difficulties and can open the door to welcome rest.

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement. . . .

�what is his object in all this?� Just so he can boast tomorrow to his friends that he played better than someone else. . . .

A half-hearted entertainment without excitement will bore him. He must have excitement, he must delude himself into imagining that he would be happy to win what he would not want as a gift if it meant giving up gambling. . . .

Without diversion, there is no joy; with diversion there is no sadness" (136).

--Greatness

"We know the truth not only through reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. The skeptics have no other aim than that, and they work at it to no purpose. We know that we are not dreaming, but, however unable we may be to prove it rationally, our inability proves nothing but the weakness of our reason, and not the uncertainty of all our knowledge, as they maintain. . . . Principles are felt, propositions proved, and both with certainty though by different means. . . . Our inability must therefore serve only to humble reason, which would like to be the judge of everything, but not to confute our certainty" (110).

"through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it" (113).

"Man�s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched. . . . In a word man knows he is wretched. thus he is wretched because he is so, and he is truly great because he knows it" (114, 122).

"Man�s greatness is so obvious that it can even be deduced from his wretchedness. . . . Who indeed would think himself unhappy not to be king except one who had been dispossessed? . . . Who would think himself unhappy if he had only one mouth and who would not if he had only one eye? It has probably never occurred to anyone to be distressed at not having three eyes, but those who have none are inconsolable" (117).

"If we claim that man is too slight to deserve communion with God, we must indeed be great to be able to judge" (231).

---Christianity resolves the contradiction

"is it not clearer than day that we feel within ourselves the indelible marks of excellence, and is it not equally true that we constantly experience the effects of our deplorable condition?" (208).

"What sort of a freak then is man! Now novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!" (131).

"Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the entire universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this" (200).

"Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness. . . . Jesus is a God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair" (192, 212).

"It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much out of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him ignorant of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him" (121).

"man�s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must account for such amazing contradictions" (149).

"The true religion would have to teach greatness and wretchedness, inspire self-esteem and self-contempt, love and hate" (450).

"All those contradictions which seemed to take me furthest from the knowledge of any religion are what led me most directly to the true religion" (404).

"With some regarding nature as incorrupt, others as irremediable, they have been unable to avoid either pride or sloth, the two sources of all vice, since the only alternative [to Christianity] is to give in through cowardice or escape through pride. For if they realized man�s excellence, they did not know his corruption, with the result that they certainly avoided sloth but sank into pride, and if they recognized the infirmity of nature, they did not know its dignity, with the result that they were certainly able to avoid vanity, only to fall headlong into despair. . . .

The Christian religion alone has been able to cure these twin vices, not by using one to expel the other according to worldly wisdom, but by expelling both through the simplicity of the Gospel. For it teaches the righteous, whom it exalts, even to participation in divinity itself, that in this sublime state they still bear the source of all corruption, which exposes them throughout their lives to error, misery, death, and sin; and it cries out to the most ungodly that they are capable of the grace of their redeemer. Thus, making those whom it justifies tremble and consoling those whom it condemns, it so nicely tempers fear with hope through this dual capacity, common to all men, that it causes infinitely more dejection than mere reason, but without despair, and infinitely more exaltation than natural pride, but without puffing us up. This clearly shows that, being alone exempt from error and vice, it is the only religion entitles to teach and correct mankind" (208).

"Wretchedness induces despair. Pride induces presumption. The Incarnation shows man the greatness of his wretchedness through the greatness of the remedy required. . . . There is no doctrine better suited to man than that which teaches him his dual capacity for receiving and losing grace, on account of the dual danger to which he is always exposed of despair or pride" (352, 354).

"Christianity is strange; It bids man to recognize that he is vile, and even abominable, and bids him want to be like God. Without such a counterweight his exaltation would make him horribly vain or his abasement horribly abject" (351). . . . "How little pride a Christian feels in believing himself united to God! How little he grovels when we likens himself to the earthworm! A fine way to meet life and death, good and evil!" (358).

"The philosophers did not prescribe feelings proportionate to the two states. They inspired impulses of pure greatness, and this is not the state of man. They inspired impulses of pure abasement, and this is not the state of man. There must be impulses of abasement prompted not by nature but by penitence, not as a lasting state but as a stage towards greatness. There must be impulses of greatness prompted not by merit but by grace, and after the stage of abasement has been passed" (398).

---Skepticism---

"The strongest of the skeptics� arguments . . . is that we cannot be sure that these principles are true (faith and revelation apart) except through some natural intuition. Now this natural intuition affords no convincing proof that they are true. There is no certainty, apart from faith, as to whether man was created by a good God, and evil demon, or just by chance, and so it is a matter of doubt, depending on our origin, whether these innate principles are true, false, or uncertain.

Moreover, no one can be sure, apart from faith, whether he is sleeping or waking . . . I pause at the dogmatists� only strong point, which is that we cannot doubt natural principles if we speak sincerely and in all good faith. To which the skeptics reply, in a word, that uncertainty as to our origin entails uncertainty as to our nature. The dogmatists have been trying to answer that ever since the world began. . . .

What then is man to do in this state of affairs? Is he to doubt everything, to doubt whether he is awake, whether he is being pinched or burned? Is he to doubt whether he is doubting, to doubt whether he exists?

No one can go that far, and I maintain that a perfectly genuine skeptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it from going astray. . . You cannot be a skeptic or a Platonist without stifling nature, you cannot e a dogmatist without turning your back on reason.

Nature confounds the skeptics and Platonists, and reason confounds the dogmatists.

"Is it not as clear as day that man�s condition is dual? The point is that if man had never been corrupted, he would, in his innocence, confidently enjoy both truth and felicity, and, if man had ever been anything but corrupt, he would have no idea either of truth or bliss. But unhappy as we are (and we should be less so if there were no element of greatness in out condition) we have an idea of happiness but we cannot attain it. we perceive an image of the truth and possess nothing but falsehood, being equally incapable of absolute ignorance and certain knowledge; so obvious is it that we once enjoyed a certain knowledge; so obvious is it that we once enjoyed a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily fallen. . . .

man infinitely transcends man, and . . . without the aid of faith he would remain inconceivable to himself" (131).

-----Why is truth of Christianity not perfectly clear?------

"it is not only right but useful for us that God should be partly concealed and partly revealed, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness as to know his wretchedness without knowing God" (446).

"�I do not demand of you blind faith.� . . . �I do not mean you to believe me submissively and without reason; I do not claim to subdue you by tyranny. Nor do I claim to account to you for everything" (149).

"�If he had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence, as he will appear on the last day with such thunder and lightning and such convulsions of nature that the dead will rise up and the blindest will see him. This is not the way he wished to appear when he came in mildness, because so many men had shown themselves unworthy of his clemency, that he wished to deprive them of the good they did not desire. It was therefore not right that he should appear in a manner manifestly divine and absolutely capable of convincing all men, but neither was it right that his coming should be so hidden that he could not be recognized by those who sincerely sought him. He wished to make himself perfectly recognizable to them. Thus wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart, he has qualified our knowledge of him by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him and not by those who do not.

"There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition" (149).

"There is enough light to enlighten the elect and enough obscurity to humiliate them. There is enough obscurity to blind the reprobate and enough light to condemn them and deprive them of excuse" (236).

"Instead of complaining that God has hidden himself, you will give thanks for revealing himself as much as he has, and you will thank him too for not revealing himself to wise men full of pride and unworthy of knowing so holy a God. Two sorts of people know him: those who are humble of heart and love their lowly state, whatever the degree of their intelligence, high or low, and those who are intelligent enough to see the truth, however much they may be opposed to it" (394).

--------Submission and Use of Reason---------

"One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason. Some men run counter to these three principles, either affirming that everything can be proved, because they know nothing of proof, or doubting everything, because they do not know when to submit, or always submitting, because they do not know when judgment is called for" (170).

"If we submit everything to reason, our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous" (173).

"It is right then, that reason should submit when it judges that it ought to submit" (174).

"There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason [to determine Truth]" (182).

"Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason."

"Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them (185).

"Reason�s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to recognize that. If natural things are beyond it, what are we to say about supernatural things?" (188).

"The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing" (423).

"It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason" (424).

M. Scott Peck

"Once we truly know that life is difficult�once we truly understand and accept it�then life is no longer difficult."

"Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other."

�The trick of the novelist, as the Psalmist said, is to sing a new song, to use new words.�

"Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Our is the only civilization is history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us to invent the most undistinguished of corruptions. No orgies, no blood running in the streets, no babies thrown off cliffs. No, we�re sentimental people and we frighten easily. True, our moral fiber is rotten. But we are kinder than ever. . . . What is new is that in our time liars and thieves and whores and adulterers wish also to be congratulated and are congratulated by the great public, if their confession is sufficiently psychological or strikes a sufficiently heartfelt and authentic note of sincerity. Oh, we are sincere. . . . we are the most sincere Laodiceans who ever got flushed down the sinkhole of history" (The Moviegoer 223-224).

"the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall�on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire" (228).

"As I see it, the function of fiction is to tell someone something about himself he already knows, but doesn�t know he knows. It gives the reader a sense of recognition. If the subject or situation is all to strange, then the message goes unrecognized and loses its point. If the reader finds the matter too familiar, then it automatically becomes redundant and trite; there�s no fascination. The �in-between� area is the target and must be successfully hit for fictional accomplishment" (Conversations 9).

- In a novel, the reader "experiences a recognition, a feeling he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know" (Conversations 24).

* "the quest for the self is probably self-defeating. If religion has any validity at all, the quest for the self is nonsense. It�s the quest for God. The self can only become self by becoming itself transparently before God."

Triviality of life: "we spend our lives fornicating and reading the newspaper"

* "This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you made of it and have to answer �scientific humanism.� That won�t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e. God" (Conversations 175).

"Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God."

"I never wanted to be a great preacher. I never wanted to be a famous anything. The passion of my soul since the day God called me...the one thing--has been that I wanted to see people come to the experience of being born again."

"We need men and women...who are humble before God, who are aware that their power comes from His indwelling Holy Spirit, and who are confirmed in their minds that God has given them a high calling as His ambassadors."

"Most people think that what the gospel is more clever, skilled people, when what it needs is more people willing to bleed, suffer, and die in a passion to see people come to Christ."

"our beliefs are really rules for action. . . . [T]o develop a thought�s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce . . . All realities influence our practice and that influence is their meaning for us. . . . In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense (James, Pragmatism 26-27).

"The contemplative life is much more fruitful for the Church than the activity of teaching and preaching" (in Merton SSM).

"[One must] take the best and most irrefragable of human theories, and let this be the raft upon which he sails through life�not without risk, as I admit, if he cannot find some sure word of God which will more surely and safely carry him" (Phaedo 85b).

* "For our discussion is on no trifling matter, but on the right way to conduct our lives" (Republic VIII, 352d).

Plato: "That all these women [of the guardian class] are to belong in common to all the men, that none are to live privately with any man, and that the children, too, are to be possessed in common, so that no parent will know his offspring or nay child his parent" (Republic 457c).

"the cause for the greatest good of our city has been shown to be the having of wives and children in common by the auxiliaries" (464b).

"our rulers will have to make considerable use of falsehood and deception for the benefit of those they rule. And we said that all such falsehoods are useful as a form of drug. . . . It follows from our previous arguments, first, that the best men must have sex with the best women as frequently as possible, while the opposite is true of the most inferior men and women, and second, that if our herd is to be of the highest possible quality, the former�s offspring must be reared but not the latter�s. And this must be brought about without being noticed by anyone except the rulers, so that our herd of guardians remains as free from dissention as possible" (459d).

"A man will call all the children born in the tenth of seventh month after he became a bridegroom his sons, if they�re male, and his daughters, if they�re female, and they�ll call him father" (461d).

"Is there any greater evil we can mention for a city than that which tears it apart and makes it many instead of one? Or any greater goof than that which binds it together and makes it one? . . . But when some suffer greatly, while others rejoice are pained by the same successes and failures, doesn�t this sharing of pleasures and pains bind the city together? . . . But when some suffer greatly, while others rejoice greatly, at the same things happening to the city ot its people, doesn�t this privatization of pleasures and pains dissolve the city? . . . Then, is the best governed city the one in which most people say �mine� and �not mine� about the same things in the same way?" (462b-c). . . . "If different people apply the term to different things, one would drag into his own house whatever he could separate from the others, and another would drag things into a different house to a different wife and children, and this would make for private pleasures and pains at private things. But our people, on the other hand, will think of the same things as their own, aim at the same goal, and, as far as possible, feel pleasure and pain in unison" (464d).

"Character is long-standing habit"

"Eighty and six years have I served him, and he never did me wrong; and how can I now blaspheme my King that has saved me? . . . If you are so vain as to think that I should swear by the genius of Caesar, as you say, pretending not to know who I am, hear my free confession. I am a Christian. But if you wish to learn what the doctrine of Christianity is, grant me a day and listen to me. . . . Call them [wild beasts]. For we have no reason to repent from the better to the worse, but it is good to change from wickedness to virtue. . . . You threaten fire that burns for a moment and is soon extinguished, for you know nothing of the judgment to come, and the fire of eternal punishment reserved for the wicked. But why do you delay? Bring what you wish. . . . I bless thee that thou hast thought me worthy of the present day and hour, to have a share in the number of martyrs and in the cup of Christ . . . Among whom may I be received in thy sight, this day, as a rich an acceptable sacrifice as thou the faithful and true God hast prepared" (Eusebius 145-48).

"A little learning is a dang�rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not this Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again" (Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism).

"To err is human, to forgive, divine"

"But where�s the man, who counsel can bestow,
Still pleas�d to teach, and yet not proud to know?
Unbiass�d, or by favour, or by spite:
Not dully prepossess�d, nor blindly right;
Tho� learn�d, well-bred; and tho� well-bred, sincere;
Modestly bold, and humanly severe:
Who to a friend his faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the merit of a foe?"

"All nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason�s spite,
One truth is clear, �Whatever IS, is RIGHT�" (Alexander Pope, Essay on Man).

"Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl�d;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!" (Alexander Pope, Essay on Man).

"O Happiness! our being�s end and aim!
Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate�er thy name:
That something still which prompts th� eternal sigh,
For which we bear to live, or dare to die"

"War its thousands slays, Peace its ten thousands" (Death).

"Man is the measure of all things"

"Admonish your friends privately, but praise them openly."

"Whatever you can lose, you should reckon of no account."

"Life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint."

�The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.�

�the [Anglican] service I had become accustomed to attend and admire was but a cold and heartless remnant of past glories, and that those prayers which in my ignorance I had ascribed to reforming piety, were in reality only scraps plucked from the solemn and perfect offices of the ancient Church. Pursuing my researches among the faithful pages of the old chronicles I discovered the tyranny, apostasy, and bloodshed by which the new religion had been established, the endless strifes, dissentions, and discords that existed among its propagators, and the devastation and ruin that attended its progress: opposed to all this, I considered the Catholic Church,; existing with uninterrupted apostolic succession, handing down the same faith, sacraments, and ceremonies, unaltered through every clime, language, and nation.� (Allitt 46).

"The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite�s dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it" (Hugo de Anima).

"Creative life is possible only for those capable of concentration and integrity, who have the courage to be lonely in their minds. It is in moments of solitariness that we glimpse visions of truth and beauty, bring them down to earth, clothe them with emotions, carve them into words, cast them into movements or frame them into philosophies. If our minds are going to become vehicles of spirit, solitude and meditation are essential. All growth is from within outwards. Spirit is freedom. True wealth is in being, not in having. A free mind is not a herd mind. . . . Ordinarily we are automata; our words and deeds, our moods and emotions, our thoughts and ideas are produced by external forces. But man must learn to act from a different basis. He must become a different being. He must not be satisfied with what he is. He must be born again or renewed in his consciousness. . . . Man cannot be satisfied with earthly possessions, not even with knowledge which instructs, informs, and even entertains. He has another destiny, the realization of spirit in him."

"Simply experiencing life isolates a man; it leaves him in a kind of void, exposed to his freedom and yet not assured of it; he finds himself in an unending sea of darkness, in a monstrous night where one only staggers from one makeshift to the next, frail, poverty-stricken, throbbing with the pain of finite existence . . . A man feels death there inside him, in the midst of life; he senses how death is the frontier that no one can cross of his own strength, how the ideals of life lose their youthful splendor and droop . . . The real argument against Christianity is the experience of life, this experience of darkness. And I have always observed that the elemental force and the arbitrary prejudgment which lie behind the technical arguments of the learned . . . against Christianity always spring from these ultimate experiences of existence which plunge mind and heart into darkness, fatigue, and despair. . . . But the experience we are speaking of is also the argument for Christianity. For what does Christianity say? What does it preach? Despite an apparently complicated system of dogma and morals, it says nothing else but this: mystery always remains mystery, but this mystery wills to disclose itself as the infinite, the incomprehensible, the unutterable being that is called God, as intimacy that gives itself in an absolute self-communication in the midst of the experience of human emptiness. . . . Can I not say I am right in clinging to light, be it ever so feeble, instead of darkness�to beatitude instead of the hellish torment of my existence?" (Rahner 5-7).

"But were I to subside into a hollow, craven skepticism because there are many different views of the world, would I stand a better chance of reaching the truth than if I remained a Christian? No, for skepticism and agnosticism are themselves only opinions among other opinions, and the hollowest and most craven of opinions at that. This is no escape from the multitude of world views. Even refraining from any decision about them is a decision�the worst decision" (9).

* "Everywhere it is an open question whether in the living of their lives men will accept the mystery above them in trustful love or sinfully squander themselves in the finitude of their own being" (105).

"But if this rationalist and technological secularism of the West. . . Not unconquered, unbounded nature alone but man�s own creation too, impresses upon him that he himself is subject to control. Do not man�s proudest, best-laid plans hurry him, even today, into an unforeseeable, astonishing, unplanned future? Does not man find himself, today more than ever, exposed to an existential anguish which proves that his planned, controlled activity still�indeed more than ever�somehow turns into enduring an unintelligible fate? In man�s freedom not always the venturing into a future of impenetrable darkness?

In truth, man still dwells in the land of the uncontrollable. Uncontrollable nature has been turned into a world of man, his own work, and indeed, on that very account all the darker, all the more sinister. Man experiences himself as one who is ever opening up the uncontrollable in freedom. He may still be intoxicated with the freedom which he has won, but it will soon become more and more clear to him (it is already clear to wise men today) that his creative freedom experiences itself as subject to control and venturing into unfathomable darkness. . . .

If mystery no longer confronts him so plainly and directly in the nature which surrounds him, it is now welling up out of his own nature. We call this mystery God. (Rahner, Do You Believe in God?, 52-54)

"For the ultimate absolute principle of all responsibility is called God. That silent listening for what we ought to do is listening to God. And by God I mean precisely him whom we encounter (though perhaps we give him no name and out of timidity avoid looking at him) by recognizing our actual freedom as an enormous burden that bears down on us and that we do not cravenly dodge" (54-55).

"Man suffers from the worldliness of his world. . . . he suffers from the world he himself has made. On closer scrutiny we find that it is because of the finitude, hazards, and mortality of human life. In short, the harsh reality of this human world, the new cruelty that man cannot help communicating to his own world, if it is to be viable, would seem to be only a new form of man�s mortality, his exposure to death. �Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower, he flees like a shadow and continues not. And thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass�" (Job 14:1,2,5). . . . Voluntary endurance of this harsh reality, over which we have little or no control, is a participation in the sufferings and death of Christ. (55-56)

"Man experiences himself as a mere draught which is swallowed up in a mystery�and by that very fact man also experiences what is really meant by God: that mystery of infinite, unutterable, blinding plenitude which appoints the beginning, insures the stubborn oneness of the whole, and takes up the perfecting of a man�s life which eludes the man himself, if only he has worked hard at it with this mystery in view" (59).

"The objective primal source of everything real is present without forming part of our world picture. And this objective primal source is the goal, unattainable by us in its own nature, (the "to which") of all we do to construct a world picture. We call it God. . . . God is not part of the world but its presupposition. He is not one objective bit of knowledge among others; he is the infinity which is always there beforehand in the motions of our knowing, and the motions of our knowing run their ever finite course within this infinity. God is not the concluding thesis deduced form the preliminary draft of a complete world picture, but rather the one thesis in all the hypotheses of our world picture. Moreover, when men construct a world picture, always and everywhere the particular structure rests on the assumption that the plurality of earthly things exhibit a meaning, a cohesion, a correlation, so that a primal, meaningful oneness precedes the plurality. The limitations and dubiety of a world picture from which all science denies sustenance can themselves only be known through an antecedent and implicit affirmation of an infinite being, aimed at indeed but thinkable only by analogy (an image that is like and unlike). We call that being God.

Thus all picturing of the world, all intellectual grasping and ordering of the plurality of things, is done by reaching forth to the unimaginable, the incomprehensible, to what is not part of the world or of any world picture but stands, infinite, behind all the plurality of earthly things. We call that God.

. . . Christian philosophy . . has always said that God is not part of the world, of that which can be experienced and understood; he is not even the keystone of them, but rather what the world and knowledge of the world presuppose. . . . he always knows it indirectly, as the infinite, in that experience of the multifarious and the conditional refers him to the absolute without bringing that experience into the ambit of human thought or direct experience" (66-68).

"The one truth, that God is, opens the door to the incomprehensible, to a domain where we do not control but are controlled, do not master but adore. We are brought into a region where of ourselves we cannot find the roads, where we are controlled by a fate we do not steer. But the courage�or rather let us rather say, the serene and confident love�with which a man entrust himself to this incomprehensibility is a deed, the deed whereby he affirms his inmost being" (72).

"reflection about experiences within the realm of our existence is inevitably done in ideas on which man is dependent, as a thinking being, for the interpretation of his particular subjective experiences. And ultimately these ideas refer him to a source in which they converge: that mystery ever present since before time was, namely God. This bedrock of human existence, bestowed in knowledge and responsible freedom, is not apprehended in itself by sensory perception or by ideas, but rather lays hold on the inward man. . . . It is the interior encounter with God . . . called faith; it is the going forth from oneself in the acknowledgment of one�s own guilt, in a surrender to the self because one trusts in God�s forgiveness and prepared to do his will insofar as he knows it. This grace of faith connotes a participation in the life of God. . ." (84)

"Faith, in Scripture and the Church�s liturgy, is obviously more than a mere intellectual assent to certain propositions; it is the trustful acceptance of God�s love for man. . . . Here faith does not abolish the uncontrollability of our lot but does overcome it. For a Christian, fate means the good pleasure of God who "is love" (1 Jn 4:8). (94-95) All suffering and all sickness, which seem to the profane eye a decay of life, become for the believer a summons and an acceptance and therefore a spiritual conquest of suffering, sickness, and death."

"Contemporary man thinks of a God essentially exalted above all things, absolute, incomprehensible. . . Faith, for a Christian, means opening himself to the mystery of the unutterably loving God, not in words alone but in the existential following of Christ. For he lived the fellowship of God and man in matchless perfection and is therefore called the �pioneer and perfector of our faith� (Heb 12:2) At the same time, faith means a deeper penetration into the content of faith, not in the sense of getting the intellectual meat out of this or that proposition but thin the sense of getting our values into order and perspective" (103-104).

"The way Christian faith is explained often fails to make it clear that we are dealing ultimately not with concepts and propositions about the mystery of God, but with the living encounter between the inner man and God, when God communicates himself to man and man accepts him by God�s grace. . . . Everywhere it is an open question whether in the living of their lives men will accept the mystery above them in trustful love or sinfully squander themselves in the finitude of their own being" (105).

"Have we ever kept silent, despite the urge to defend ourselves, when we were being unfairly treated? Have we ever forgiven another though we gained nothing by it and our forgiveness was accepted as something quite natural? Have we ever made a sacrifice without even feeling any inward satisfaction? Have we ever decided to do a thing simply for the sake of conscience, knowing that we must bear sole responsibility for our decision without being able to explain it to anyone? Have we ever tried to act purely for love of God when no warmth sustained us, when our act seemed a leap in the dark, simply nonsensical? Were we ever good to someone without expecting a trace of gratitude and without the comfortable feeling of having been �unselfish�? If we can find such experiences in our life, then we have had that very experience of the Spirit which we are after here�the experience of the Eternal, the experience that the Spirit is something more than and different from his world, the experience that happiness in this world is not the whole point of existence, the experience of trust as we slip into darkness, the experience of a faith for which this world provides no reason" (112-113).

�After the phase of indiscriminate �openness� it is time that the Christian require the consciousness of belonging to a minority and of being in opposition to what is obvious, plausible, and natural for that mentality which the New Testament calls�and certainly not in a positive sense�the spirit of the world.� It is time to find again the courage of nonconformism, the capacity to oppose many of the trends of the surrounding culture, renouncing a certain euphoric post-conciliar solidarity� (Ratzinger Report 1985)

 Charles Reade

"Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit, and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny."

"If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder" (1866).

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him."

"Thus we live, forever taking leave"

�climbing, like life, is one of those things you can never get enough of� (220).

�once life has momentarily become precious, it can never fail to dissatisfy when it is merely routine� (232).

�Hence the mountains, in a sense, could mean more to me than people could. But what sort of relationship is possible between a man and a mountain?� (232).

�Death, our only glimpse of that entropic end, has its seductive fascination. Hence, the risks of climbing stir and motivate us� (233).

�The mountain was beautiful; perhaps that is all that need to be said. That, and that it would be very hard to climb� (234).

�Mountains might end in summits, but there was no limit to the mountaineer�s urge� (237).

�A man�s best moments seem to go by before he notices them; and he spends a large part of his life reaching back for them, like a runner for whom the baton will never come� (258).

�Yet I feel I cannot get at the heart of it either. Perhaps I care too much; perhaps so long as I care, I can never explain; perhaps if I stop caring, I will forget� (259).

�An existentialist dream (or nightmare), our cave, the perfect realization of man�s essential solitude, which was discovered in the twentieth century among the crowds in Paris and New York, though men have been as alone as glaciers and galaxies since they learned to think� (280).

�After all, it would be nice to believe that climbing could somehow be a search for truth as well as for a summit. Or, if one assumes that life itself is that kind of search, it would be nice to believe that climbing could actually find something. It would somehow justify the effort� (281).

�Men, among them mountaineers, have claimed that the only discovery one can make by climbing is that of oneself. . . . Will it cure loneliness? Will it make death sweet? Yet I have come down from mountains comprehending no better who I am or why I climbed that when I set out, and still been happy. Climbers take risks, and to climb is so all-involving that it temporarily approximates life. If the old question, the one Mallory tried to answer is a valid one, I have given up trying to meet it rationally. Perhaps, if one were immortal, he would feel prompted to ask an ordinary person �Why do you live?� How well could that embarrassed mortal answer? Beyond the neatness of any rationale for life lies its untranslatable glory, the elemental courage of wanting to live. Climbing is serious, because it is like life for us who do it, not like a sport; perhaps we betray it by trying to explain our reasons� (283).

�Perhaps there is no point laying one�s soul open to the universe. The sky is blue, trees and grass grow, men live; what more do we need to know? Let us declare, then, that we will ignore the universe�after all, it ignores us� (312).

�There was no one to tell about it [the ascent of Mt Huntington]. There was, perhaps, nothing to tell. . . . There was . . . no gesture appropriate for what we felt we had done. . . . But I knew that we would forget, that someday all I should remember would be the memories themselves, rehearsed like an archaic dance; that I should stare at the pictures and try to get back inside them, reaching out for something that had slipped out of my hands and spilled into the darkness of the past. And that someday I might be so old that all that might pierce my heart would be the vague heartpang of something lost and inexplicably sacred� (332-333).

�beyond our feeling of �commitment,� there lay the barriers of our disparate self-love. . . . What a joke we played on ourselves�the whole affair of mountaineering seemed a farce then� (344).

�dying without pain or fear seems to me the equivalent of living without joy. Let us be aware of our end, because life is all we have� (357).

�We had spent forty days alone there, only to come back one man less, it seemed. We had found no answers to life: perhaps only the room in which to look for them� (358).

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."

"Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood�the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life."

"Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure."

"I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be �happy.� I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, after all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all."

"It is in our hearts that the evil lies, and it is from our hearts that it must be plucked out" (in Guiness 17).

"the whole problem of evil is the problem of reconciling divine power with the requirements of what we ordinarily consider to be moral and social standards" (in Carnell 305).

"Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because those questions enlarge our conceptions of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good" (The Problems of Philosophy , 161).

"It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true" (Skeptical Essays).

Russell: "That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of the ages, the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man�s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins�all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet no nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul�s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Brief and powerless is man�s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way. For man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gates of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate for a moment his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned, despite the trampling march of unconscious power (Bertrand Russell, "Free Man�s Worship").

"I for a long time accepted the argument that there must be a First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill�s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question �Who made me?� cannot be answered since it immediately suggests the further question �Who made God?�" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument" (Why I am Not a Christian, 6-7).

"As for things not having a cause, the physicists assure us that individual quantum transitions in atoms have no cause" (in Sproul 120).

"Neither do we deny that there are problems in the text that we presently have. But problems are quite different from errors. Indeed, in the face of the claims that the Bible apparently makes for itself about inspiration and inerrancy, it would seem more reasonable to place one�s faith in the Scriptures which have been proved to be true again and again than in any fallible human opinion. Man�s knowledge of these problems is limited and has in some instances proved to be wrong. Time will undoubtedly continue to bring to light facts which will help solve the yet unsolved problems in the Bible" (Ryrie 42).