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

"The Jews had themselves learned that divine deposits of dessicated Scripture and the practices deriveing from them were simply insufficient guides to human conduct. Thou shalt not kill? But the Old Testament enjoins exactly that, ordering killing, here and there: when combatting the enemy, executing the criminal, discouraging idolatry. So that just as the Ten Commandments could not comprehensively prescribe moral behavior, neither could the words spoken by Christ or His disciples. Continuing instruction was needed together with the authority to conduct such instruction�the relevant insight. This teaching authority is invested in the �magesterium,� the teaching Church. By the term �evolution of Christian doctrine,� Catholics understand themselves to be saying that which is better understood with the passage of time and the crystallization of theological thought� (Buckley Nearer, My God 42).

Hail Mary: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."

Hail Queen (Salve Regina): "Hail holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn, then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary."

Prayer for my Vocation:

Loving God,
You have called me to life
and gifted me in many ways.
Help me to become all
You desire of me.

Lead me to choose the path of life
You have planned for me.
Open my heart to listen to
Your call and guide me with your
Holy Spirit that I may have the
courage to respond to You.

Enkindle in my heart
and the hearts of others the desire
to make the world a better place.
Amen.

 On the Modern Condition

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life�s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing (Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v.).

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

Nietzsche: "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."

"Meaningless! Meaningless! . . . Everything is meaningless. . . . [W]hen I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun. . . . What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless. . . . Man�s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come form dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth? . . . I saw the tears of the oppressed�and they have no comforter; power was on the side if their oppressors�and they have no comforter. And I declared that the dead who had died are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun. . . . For who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow? . . . Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God had given you under the sun�all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:11, 22-23; 3:19-21; 4:1-3; 6:12; 9:9).

"Modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother, and set up in their place the ideals of material security, general welfare, and humanness. But it takes more than an ordinary dose of optimism to make it appear that these ideals are still unshaken. Material security, even, has gone by the board, for the modern man begins to see that every step in material �progress� adds just so much force to the threat of a more stupendous catastrophe . . . Let man but accumulate his materials of destruction and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use. It is well known that firearms go off by themselves if only enough of them are together" (Carl Gustav Jung, 1935; Christianity and Modern Man, p. 14).

"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" (Russell, "Free Man�s Worship," Christianity and Modern Man, p. 15).

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

H.J. Blackman: "On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. If there is a bridge over a gorge which spans only half the distance and ends in mid-air, and if the bridge is crowded with human beings pressing on, one after another they fall into the abyss. The bridge leads nowhere. . . . It does not matter where they think they are going, what preparations for the journey they may have made, how much they may be enjoying it all. The objection merely points out objectively that such a situation is a model of futility" (Objections to Humanism. Riverside, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1967).

Stephen Weinberg, Harvard scientist: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" (The First Three Minutes. New York: Basic Books, 1976).

Kierkegaard: "There is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that . . . he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain" (22).

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

Pascal: "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 ther 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?"

On America

"If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity." Daniel Webster

"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." T Roosevelt

"The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival to the United States . . . [I]n France I had seen the spirits of religion and of freedom almost always marching in opposite directions. In America, I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land . . . [The main reason for the amount of religious activity in America is] separation of church and state . . . throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that. . . . [R]eligion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions. . . . I am sure that [all Americans] think it necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions. That is not the view of one class or party among the citizens, but of the whole nation; it is found in all its ranks." Alexis de Tocqueville

"I sought to the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers�and it was not there . . . in her fertile fields and boundless forests�and it was not there . . . in her rich mines and her vast world commerce�and it was not there . . . in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution�and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." Alexis de Tocqueville

"No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand [of God] which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States . . . [T]he foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality . . . [T]here is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness" [First Inaugural Address (April 30, 1789)]. Commager (ed.) Documents of American History, p. 152. George Washington

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, the firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connection with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert? . . . And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion . . . [R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle" [Farewell Address (September 17, 1796)]. Commager (ed.) Documents of American History, p. 173. George Washington

On Pantheism

"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).

On Marxism/ Communism

Lenin: "you cannot make an omelet without breaking the eggs." (i.e. end justifies means)

Stalin: "When you chop wood, chips fly."

Lenin: "We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is deception, dupery, stultification of the workers and peasants in the interests of the landowners and capitalists. We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat�s class struggle. . . . We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, a communist society" (Bolshevik Visions, ed. Rosenberg, p. 33,35).

Kierkegaard: "It is very doubtful, then, that the age will be saved through the notion of social organization, of association. In our age the principle of association . . . is an evasion, a dissipation, an illusion, whose dialectic is [that] as it strengthens individuals, so it weakens them. It strengthens by numbers, by solidarity, but from the ethical point of view this is a weakening. Not until the single individual has established an ethical stance in despite of the whole world, not until then can there be any question of genuinely uniting. Otherwise it gets to be a union of people who separately are weak; a union as unbeautiful and depraved as child-marriage" (Muggeridge).

Koestler: "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but also demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community�which may dispose of it as an experimental rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. . . . Those are the consequences of our consequentialness" (Koestler 128, 130).

Wat: "communism is, in fact, exteriorization. Communism is the enemy of interiorization, of the inner man. If we had leftist tendencies, fantasies, and fascinations and were spellbound by Communism, it was because we had seen both the treachery and the danger of interiorization. But today we know what exteriorization leads to: the killing of the inner man, and that is the essence of Stalinism. The essence of Stalinism is the poisoning of the inner man so that it becomes shrunken the way headhunters shrink heads�those shriveled little heads�and then disappears completely. . . . The inner man must be killed for the communist Decalogue to be lodged in the soul" (92).

Wat: "There was only one alternative [communism], only one global answer to negation. The entire illness stemmed from that need, that hunger for something all-embracing. In fact, communism arose to satisfy certain hungers. The phenomena was inevitable insofar as powerful hungers had arisen in modern societies, even in those of the nineteenth century. One of those hungers was a hunger for a catechism, a simple catechism. That sort of hunger burns in refined intellectuals much more than it does in the man on the street. The man on the street always had a catechism; he replaced one catechism with another" (21).

"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).

Dostoevsky: "This is a matter of the soul, a psychological matter. In order to make the world over anew, people themselves must turn onto a different path psychically. Until one has indeed become the brother of all, there will be no brotherhood. No science or self-interest will ever enable people to share their property and their rights among themselves without offense" (303).

"ethical relativism . . . was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the mean. . . the [Marxist] state is the end while it lasts, and man only a means to that end" (Martin Luther King, Jr. 92-93).

Havel: "In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology [communism] inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is believe, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one�s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority" (38-39).

Kovaly: "I cannot believe that something inherantly good can turn into its exact opposite just because of some mistakes or personal failures. If the system was fair and sound, it would provide ways of compensating for error. If it can only function when the leadership is made up of geniuses and all the people are one hundred percent honest and infallible, then it�s a bad system. It might work in heaven, but its a foolish and destuctive illusion for this world. Look at all those idealists who wanted nothing more than to work for the well-being of others; half of them are in jail; the other half start trembling every time their doorbell rings" (104).

Milosz: "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).

On Probability

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

[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).

"Objective evidences and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?" (James).

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

"The evidence of religion, then, being admitted real, those who object against it as not satisfactory, i.e., as not being what they wish it, plainly forget the very condition of our being: for satisfaction, in this sense, does not belong to such a creature as man (Analogy 247).

Plato: "[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" (Phaedo 85b).

James: We cannot escape the issue [of religious commitment] by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in the way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as decisively as if he went and married someone else? Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of the option; it is the option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error�that is your faith-vetoer�s exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field (The Will to Believe 26).

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).

When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait�acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true�till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and sense working together may have raked in evidence enough,�this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. . . . Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. There whole defense of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis give to the world an expression which specifically determines our actions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief (The Will to Believe 29-30).

"Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis [where the believer�s] . . . intimate persuasion is that the odds in its favor are strong enough to warrant him in acting all along on the assumption of its truth" (James in Smith Atheism: The Case against God 185).

"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" (Rahner 9).

[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).

To preach skepticism to us as a duty until �sufficient evidence� for religion be found, is tantamount to telling us, when in the presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law . . . [W]hat proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist�s command to imitate his kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for it still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature . . . to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting on the winning side,�that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right (Will to Believe 27).

But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men. It does not follow, because recklessness may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to them. What should be preached is courage weighted with responsibility, �such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize danger in case they met defeat (x-xi).

And, which is more material, [skeptics] forget also the very nature of religion. For religion presupposes, in all those who will embrace it, a certain degree of integrity and honesty; which it was intended to try whether men have or not, and to exercise in such as have it, in order to its improvement. . . . And therefore the question is not at all, Whether the evidence of religion be satisfactory; but Whether it be, in reason, sufficient to prove and discipline that virtue, which it presupposes (Analogy 247-248).

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

We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we meet the hypothesis halfway. . . one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods� acquaintance. This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately feeling there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be logically required. I therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really true, would be an irrational rule (Will to Believe 28).

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 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).

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. . . . 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 (Apologia 182-83).

On Postmodernism

Terry Eagleton, Oxford literary critic: "Post-modernism signals the end of such �metanarratives� whose secretly terroristic function was to ground and legitimate the illusion of a �universal� human history. We are now in the process of awakening from the nightmare of modernity, with its manipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-back pluralism of the post-modern, that heterogeneous range of life-styles and language games which has renounced the nostalgic urge to totalize and legitimate itself . . . Science and philosophy must jettison their grandiose metaphysical claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives" (in McGrath 187).

Allan Bloom: "The danger . . . is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness�and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and the various ways of life and kinds of human beings�is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think that you are right at all" (in McGrath 190).

Os Guiness: "Where modernism was a manifesto of human self-confidence and self-congratulation, postmodernism is a confession of modesty, if not despair. There is no truth; only truths. There is no grand reason; only reasons. There is no privileged civilization (of cultures, beliefs, norm and style); only a multiplicity of cultures, beliefs, norms, and styles. There is no universal justice; only interests and the competition of interest groups. There is no grand narrative of human progress; only countless stories of where people and their cultures are now. There is no simple reality or any grand objectivity of universal, detached knowledge; only a ceaseless representation of everything in terms of everything else" (in McGrath 180).

"throughout Foucault�s writings, we find a passionate belief that repression is wrong. Foucault himself is thus committed to an objective moral value�that freedom is to be preferred to repression. Foucault�s critique of the moral values of society seems to leave him without any moral values of his own�yet his critique of social values rests on his own intuitively accepted (rather than explicitly acknowledged and theoretically justified) moral values, which he clearly expects his readers to share. . . . In effect, he makes an appeal to sentimentality rather than to reason, to pathos rather than to principles" (McGrath 194).

Ben Meyer: "The followers of Nietzsche and Foucault are passionately persuaded that truth is a mere rhetorical device employed in the service of repression, and say so at length. What, then, is the status of their saying so? We should give them their choice. is it false? Or in the service of oppression?" (in McGrath 194).

Rorty (admits): "When the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form �There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society, which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you'" (in McGrath 197).

On This Life-Afterlife Relationship

"If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training or correction and it�s not so bad" (Lewis Grand Miracle 27).

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

"Every action of yours, every thought, should be those of one who expects to die before the day is out. Death would have no great terrors for you if you had a quiet conscience . . . If you aren�t fit to face death today, it�s very unlikely you will be tomorrow" (Thomas a�Kempis).

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

"Our life here is, then, to be looked upon as a period of training and discipline designed to teach us, if we are willing to learn, how to become better, and since it is mainly through suffering that men learn, suffering is to be expected. We cannot, then, expect to be very happy here on earth, and we cannot expect to be very good" (Joad, The Recovery of Belief).

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

"Now I begin to be a disciple. Nothing whether of things visible or invisible, excites my ambition, as long as I can gain Christ. Whether fire, or the cross, the assault of wild beasts, the tearing asunder of my bones, the breaking of my limbs, the bruising of my whole body, let the tortures of the devil all assail me, if I do but gain Christ Jesus" (St. Ignatius).

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

"What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away" (St. Paul).

"For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. . . . I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far . . ." (St Paul).

"My Kingdom is not of this world" (Jesus Christ, John 18:36).

On Ambition

"And what we call ambition usually means the wish to be more conspicuous or more successful than someone else. It is this competitive element in it that is bad. It is perfectly reasonable to want to dance well or to look nice. But when the dominant wish is to dance better or look nicer . . . then you are going wrong" (Lewis Grand Miracle 31).

Practical Apologetics

People find arguments for existence of God boring and are usually willing to go straight to argument for divinity of Christ. Few determined atheists (Lewis Grand Miracle 74)

"Nothing is more dangerous for one�s faith than apologetics" (Lewis Grand Miracle 76).

On Sexuality

"this commonly happens in periods of disillusionment like our own, when philosophies are bankrupt and life appears without hope�me and women may turn in sheer boredom and discontent, trying to find in it some stimulus which is not provided by the drab discomfort of their mental and physical surroundings. . . . The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth-century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of those periods of spiritual depression, where people go to bed because they have nothing better to do" (Sayers 87).

"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).

On Hell

Augustine: "the eternal fire will be proportioned to the deserts of the wicked, so that to some it will be more, and to others less painful" (XXI.16).

Merton: "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).

Kierkegaard: "And so, if you have lived in despair, then, regardless of whatever else you won or lost, everything is lost for you, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you�or still more terrible, it knows you as you we known and it binds you to yourself in despair" (Sickness 28).

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

Lewis: "I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghost may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man "wishes" to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free" (Lewis Problem 127-28).

Lewis: "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, �Thy will be done,� and those to whom God says, in the end, �Thy will be done.� All that are in Hell, choose it. . . . this bad man�s perdition [may be thought of] not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is" (Martindale 293, 291).

On Church and State

"Religion was to be a context for political behavior (many would have said the necessary context), not a concern of the political process itself." Noll, Mark. One Nation Under God? San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publisher, 1988, p.194-196).

"a critical distance between the institutional life of the churches and the institutional life of the government." Noll, Mark. One Nation Under God? San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publisher, 1988, p. 66).

"United with government, religion never rises above merest superstition; united with religion, government never rises above the merest despotism." (Ohio Supreme Court quoted in Sherrow, Victoria. Separation of Church and State. New York: Impact Books-Franklin Watts, 1992, p.42-43).

"[t]he First Amendment, to put it simply, prohibits both state sponsorship of and state hostility toward religion. Government relations with religious bodies must fall in the neutral zone between." (Lesly, Elizabeth. "Pennies from Heaven." Washington Monthly, April 1991, p. 40-45.).

On Cosmological Proof

Feuerbach: "Thus the difficulties arising from the question of the beginning of the world are only postponed or thrust aside or glossed over by the notion of a God, a being outside the world; they are not solved. Is it not therefore more reasonable to assume that the world always was and always will be, and consequently that it has the ground of its existence within itself" (Lectures 101).

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

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

Feuerbach: The order is reversed: the air does not exist to be breathed, but breathing exists because of air. Light does not exist to be seen by the eye, but the eye exist because of light. The earth would not allow life if it were where Mercury is, but then it wouldn�t be the earth. The earth is only what it is because of its place in the solar system. It was not placed there to generate life, but life originated on it because of its place in the solar system. "Just as it is meaningless to ask why there is anything at all, so it is meaningless to ask why this particular thing is as it is and not otherwise" (129). If I take away the distinguishing properties, I take away its existence. Things are because they are. "Where the condition and ground of a thing are given, the consequence is inevitable; where the substance, the matter of life is given, life cannot be absent" (Lectures 130).

Jim Holt: "Yet even if Darwin�s theory is fundamentally sound . . . that doesn�t mean the design argument is defunct. For in recent decades, physists have noticed an astonishing thing about the fundamental laws of nature. The 20 or so parameters they contain�numbers governing the strength of gravity, the ratio of the proton�s size to the neutron�s, and so on�appear to have been fine-tuned so that, against astronomically unfavorable odds, conscious organisms could emerge. Make gravity the slightest bit weaker and no galaxies suitable for life would have formed; make it the slightest bit stronger and the cosmos would have collapsed upon itself moments after the big bang" (Wall Street Journal, December 24, 1997).

Joad: "[N]atural law, on determinist principles, also determines the movements of brains, and therefore, of minds. Thoughts are movements of and events in mind. Thoughts, then, are determined by natural law. How, then, can thoughts be false?" (Joad 144).

On Moral Argument

"just as the explanation of the facts of the natural world must lie outside it, so, too must the explanation of the facts of moral experience lie beyond it, since, while modes of explanation which rely purely on natural causation may explain how things behave according to their natures . . . they cannot explain why creatures should go against the dictates of their nature, as man does when he opposes duty to desire and recognizes the imperative of �ought�" (Joad 79).

On Argument from Supernatural Desire: because man cannot fulfill his prime desire for happiness, there must be an eternal, infinite life to come.

Lewis: "The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things�the beauty, the memory of our own past�are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.

"A man�s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation in a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man�s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called �falling in love� occurred in a sexless world" (Weight 29, 30).

Simone Weil: "The danger is not whether the soul should doubt there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of hunger is not a belief; it is a certainty" (in McGrath 84-85).

Feuerbach: These desires are artificial, imaginary, not the desires of a real human heart. The limitations Christian faith tries to escape are not really limitations, but the necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it.

Percy: "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).

"It is hard to credit in practice and it leads to self-contradiction in theory to suppose that nature has constituted man in such a way that he can only survive and prosper if he holds a belief in something which is not. . . . if it [the materialist account of the origin and nature of human beings and their wishes] is true, then the needs and wishes which religion seeks to fulfill and to satisfy must point to some factor in the external world which has generated them, and which guarantees the possibility of their satisfaction, in which event religion cannot be merely subjective" (Joad 91, 93).

On Foreknowledge and Free Will

Milton: "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" (III.116-119).

Augustine: "[W]e are by no means compelled either, retaining the prescience of God, to take away the freedom of the will, or, retaining the freedom of the will, to deny that He is prescient of future things, which is impious. . . . [I]t is not in vain that laws are enacted, and that reproaches, exhortations, praises, and vituperations are had recourse to; for these also He foreknew, and they are of great avail, even as great as He foeknew that they would be of. Prayers, also, are of great avail to precure those things which He foreknew that He would grant to those who offerred them; and with justice have rewards been appointed for good deeds, and punishments for sins. For a man does not therefore sin because God foreknew that he would sin. Nay, it cannot be doubted but that it is the man himself who sins when he does sis, because He, whose foreknowledge is infallible, foreknew not that fate, or fortune, or something else would sin, but that the man himself would sin, who if he wills not, sins not. But if he shall not will to sin, even this did God forknow" (City of God V.10).

"How is it that these two propositions are not contradictory and inconsistent: (1) God has foreknowledge of everything in the future; and (2) We sin by the will, not by necessity? For, you say, if God foreknows that someone is going to sin, then it is necessary that he sin. But if it is necessary, the will has no choice about whether to sin; there is an inescapable and fixed necessity. And so you fear that this argument forces us into one of two positions: either we draw the heretical conclusion that God does not foreknow everything in the future; or, if we cannot accept this conclusion, we must admit that sin happens by necessity and not by will" (Free Choice 74).

"Unless I am mistaken, you do not force someone to sin just because you foreknow that he is going to sin. Nor does your foreknowledge force him to sin, even if he is undoubtedly going to sin�since otherwise it would not be genuine foreknowledge. So if your foreknowledge is consistent with his freedom in sinning, so that you foreknow what somebody else is going to do by his own will, then God forces no one to sin, even though he foresees those who are going to sin by their own will.

Why then can�t our just God punish those things that his foreknowledge does not force to happen? Just as your memory does not force the past to have happened, God�s foreknowledge does not force the future to happen. And just as you remember some things that you have done but did not do everything that you remember, God foreknows everything that he causes but does not cause everything that he foreknows. . . . Therefore, you must understand that God justly punishes the sins that he foreknows but does not cause" (Free Choice 78).

"God who gave them the power to will, did not force them to sin; and there are angels who never have sinned and never will sin. . . . So be sure that such a creature exists in the higher places and in the splendor of the heavens, since if the Creator manifested his goodness in creating something that he foresaw would sin, he certainly manifested his goodness in creating something that he foreknew would not sin. . . . They did not persevere in their good will because they received this activity; rather, they received this activity because God, who gave it to them, foresaw that they would persevere" (Free Choice 80-81, 94).

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

On Calvinism/ Predestination

Augustine: "God made some vessels of wrath to dishonor and other vessels of mercy to honor; in punishment rendering to the former what is due [from Adam�s sin], in grace giving to the later what is not due: in order that by the very comparison of itself with the vessels of wrath, the heavenly city, which sojourns on earth, may learn not to put confidence in the liberty of its own will, but may hope to call on the name of the Lord God" (City of God XV.21).

Augustine: "Hence the whole mass of the human race is condemned; for he who at first gave entrance to sin has been punished with all his posterity who were in him as in a root so that no one is exempt from this just and due punishment [eternity in hell], unless delivered by mercy and undeserved grace; and the human race is so apportioned that in some is displayed the efficacy of merciful grace, in the rest the efficacy of just retribution. . . . [M]any more are left under punishment than are delivered from it, in order that it may thus be shown what was due to all. And had it been inflicted on all, no one could justly have found fault with the justice of Him who taketh vengeance; whereas, in the deliverance of so many from that just award, there is cause to render the most cordial thanks to the gratuitous bounty of Him who delivers" (City of God XXI.12).

Augustine: "by [Adam and Eve] so great a sin was committed, that by it the human nature was altered for the worse, and was transmitted also to their posterity, liable to sin and subject to death. And the kingdom of death so reigned over men, that the deserved penalty of sin would have hurled all headlong even into the second death, of which there is no end, had not the undeserved grace of God saved some therefrom" (City of God XIV.1).

Augustine: "But even the infants, not personally in their own life, but according to the common origin of the human race, have all broken God�s covenant in that one in whom all have sinned. . . . [E]ven the infants are, according to true belief, born in sin, not actual but original, so that we confess they have need of grace for the remission of sins . . . Whoever is not born again, that soul shall perish from his people, because he hath broken my covenant, since he also has sinned in Adam with all others" (City of God XVI.27).

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

Augustine: "That is the Catholic view: a view that can demonstrate a just God in so many and great punishments and torments of little children" (in Kung 85).

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

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

Pascal: "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 (Pascal 131).

John Stuart Mill: "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 hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go" (in Carnell 306-307).

Luther: "God conceals His eternal mercy and loving kindness beneath eternal wrath, His righteousness beneath unrighteousness . . . Now, the highest degree of faith is to believe that He is merciful, though He saves so few and damns so many; to believe that He is just, though of His own will He makes us perforce proper subjects of damnation, and seems (in Erasmus� words) �to delight in the torments of poor wretches and to be a fitter object for hate than for love� If I could by any means understand how this same God, who makes such a show of wrath and unrighteousness, can yet be merciful and just, there would be no need for faith. But as it is, the impossibility of understanding makes room for the exercise of faith . . . Doubtless it gives the greatest possible offense to common sense or natural reason, that God, who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men. . . . It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been a stumbling block to so many great men down the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man. (That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace.) This is why so much toil and trouble has been devoted to clearing the goodness of God, and throwing the blame on man�s will. . . . [I]t is inexplicable how God can damn him who by his own strength can do nothing but sin and become guilty. Both the light of nature and the light of grace here insist that the fault lies not in the wretchedness of man, but in the injustice of God. . . . But the light of glory insists otherwise, and will one day reveal God, to Whom alone belongs a judgment whose justice is incomprehensible . . . provided only that in the meanwhile we believe it, as we are instructed and encouraged to do" (Luther 101, 217, 315f).

On Death

"our whole life is nothing but a race towards death, in which no one is allowed to stand still for a little space, or to go somewhat more slowly, but all are driven forwards with an impartial movement, and with equal rapidity" (XIII.10).

Ghandi (1925): �I urge the advocates of artificial methods to consider the consequences. Any large use of the methods is likely to result in the dissolution of the marriage bond and in free love.�

Humanae Vitae: "If, then, there are serious motives to space out births, which derive from the physical or psychological conditions of husband and wife, or from external conditions, the Church teaches that it is then licit to take into account the natural rhythms immanent in the generative functions, for the use of marriage in the infecund periods only, and in this way to regulate birth without offending the moral principles which have been recalled earlier"(16).

Humanae Vitae: "The Church is coherent with herself when she considers recourse to the infecund periods to be licit, while at the same time condemning, as being always illicit, the use of means directly contrary to fecundation, even if such use is inspired by reasons which may appear honest and serious. In reality, there are essential differences between the two cases; in the former, the married couple make legitimate use of a natural disposition; in the latter, they impede the development of natural processes. It is true that, in the one and the other case, the married couple are concordant in the positive will of avoiding children for plausible reasons, seeking the certainty that offspring will not arrive; but it is also true that only in the former case are they able to renounce the use of marriage in the fecund periods when, for just motives, procreation is not desirable, while making use of it during infecund periods to manifest their affection and to safeguard their mutual fidelity. By so doing, they give proof of a truly and integrally honest love" (16).

Humanae Vitae: "each and every marriage act (quilibet matrimonii usus) must remain open to the transmission of life" (11).

Familiarus Consortio: "Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life, but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality. When, instead, by means of recourse to periods of infertility, the couple respect inseparable connection between the unitive and procreative meanings of human sexuality, they are acting as "ministers" of God's plan and they "benefit from" their sexuality according to the original dynamism of "total" self-giving, without manipulation or alteration" (31).

Costi Connubii: "First consideration is due the offspring, which many have the audacity to call the disagreeable burden of matrimony and which they say is to be carefully avoided by married people not through virtuous continence (which Christian law permits in matrimony when both parties consent) but by frustrating the marriage act. Some justify this criminal abuse on the ground that they are weary of children and wish to gratify their desires without their consequent burden. Others say that they cannot on the one hand remain continent nor on the other can they have children because of the difficulties, whether on the part of the mother or on the part of family circumstances.[1] But no reason, however grave, may be put forward by anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good. Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose, sin against nature, and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious. Small wonder, therefore, if Holy Writ bears witness that the Divine Majesty regards with greatest detestation this horrible crime, and at times has punished it with death. As St. Augustine notes, "Intercourse even with one's legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the offspring is prevented. Onan, the son of Judah, did this and the Lord killed him for it."[2] Since, therefore, openly departing from the uninterrupted Christian tradition, some recently have adjudged it possible solemnly to declare another doctrine regarding this question, the Catholic Church, to whom God has entrusted the defense of the integrity and the purity of morals, standing erect in the midst of the moral ruin which surrounds her,[3] in order that she may preserve the chastity of the nuptial union from being defiled by this foul stain, raises her voice in token of her divine ambassadorship and through Our mouth proclaims anew: any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin."

"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).

"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).

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

On Freedom, Nietzschean/ Sartian

"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).

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

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

Sayers: "For the true freedom of the Energy consists in its willing submission to the limitations of its own medium. The attempt to achieve freedom from the medium ends invariably in loss of freedom within the medium, since, here as everywhere, activity falls under the judgment of its own nature" (Mind of the Maker, 65-66).

On Love

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

On Judging Others

Longfellow: "If we could read the secret history of all our enemies, we should find in each man�s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm hostility."

Beecher: "Compassion will cure more sins that condemnation."

Goethe: "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them to become what they are capable of being."

On Writing

Michael Byers: "I see my job as a writer to get into everyone�s head, to make them real and not caricatures."

Pascal: "The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first" (Pensees).

Vonnegut: "Find a subject you car about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is the genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style."

Samuel Johnson: "The greatest part of a writer�s time is spent in reading, in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

"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).

"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).

On Spiritual Inspiration

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

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

"My Dear Wormwood, I note with displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. . . . There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy�s camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mentally and bodily, are still in our favour. . . . Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what he calls his "free" lovers and servants�"sons" is the word he uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to "do it on their own." And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt (C.S. Lewis. The Screwtape Letters, p. 15, 17-18).

On Government

"It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right." (Gladstone)

"When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship." (Truman)

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint." (Alexander Hamilton).

"It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government, owes not onl a proportion of his property, but even his personal services to the defense of it." (Washington)

On Insecurity in Belief

"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).

"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 minf 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).

On Sacraments

Sacrament = "a divinely prescribed ceremony of the Church in which the words and action combine to from what is at the same time both a sign of divine grace and a fount of divine grace" (Whitcomb Answer 17).

On Canon

Josephus: "We have not tens of thousands of books, discordant and conflicting, but only twenty-two [the standard number from the Hebrew Bible, 24, probably comes from the combinations Judges-Ruth and Jeremiah-Lamentations], containing the record of all time, which have been justly believed (to be divine)... And of these, five [Gen, Ex, Lev, Num, Deut] are the books of Moses, which embrace the laws and the tradition from the creation of man until his (Moses�) death. This period is a little short of three thousand years. From the death of Moses to the reign of Artaxerxes, the successor of Xerxes, king of Persia, the prophets who succeeded Moses wrote what was done in thirteen books [probably 1/2 Sam, 1/2 Ki, 1/2 Chron, Ezra-Neh, The Twelve, Job, Isa, Eze, Dan, Jer-Lam, Esther, Joshua, Judges-Ruth]. The remaining four books embrace hymns to God and counsels for men for the conduct of life [probably Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon]. From Artaxerxes until our time everything has been recorded, but has not been deemed worthy of like credit with what preceded, because the exact succession of the prophets ceased. But what faith we have placed in our own writings is evident by our conduct; for though so long a time has now passed, no one has dared either to add anything to them, or to take anything from them, or to alter anything in them. But it is instinctive in all Jews at once from their very birth to regard them as commands of God, and to abide by them, and if need be, cheerfully to die for them" (Josephus, Against Apion I.8.41,42 quoted in Wenham 135-36, Geisler Apologetics 365-66).