“Let us not claim for ourselves more license in judgement, unless we wish to limit God’s power and confine his mercy by law. For God, whenever it pleases him, adopts the stranger into the church. And the Lord does this to frustrate men’s opinion and restrain their rashness—which, unless it is checked, ventures to assume for itself a greater right of judgment than it deserves.”—Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.xii.9
“This is the first law of a minister, to do nothing without a command.”—Ibid., IV.xix.5
“The righteous and Godly man should be ready patiently to bear the malice of those whom he desires to become good, in order to increase the number of good men—not to add himself to the number of bad by a malice like theirs.”—Ibid., IV.xx.20
“[The Lord] is as gracious in the manner of His mercy, as in the matter of it.”—Spurgeon, Morning and Evening Morning, Aug. 17
“The blood was not only sprinkled upon the door-posts of Israel’s dwelling houses, but upon the sanctuary, the mercy-seat, and the altar, because as sin intrudes into our holiest things, the blood of Jesus is needed to purify them from defilement. If mercy be needed to be exercised towards our duties, what shall be said of our sins?”—Spurgeon, Morning and Evening Morning, Aug. 29
“But there is a further development, which we owe (I believe) entirely to Aristotle; a brilliant conceit. (There is no reason why we should not contribute a conceit to him; he was a wit, and a dressy man, as well as a philosopher.)—C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words
“The free study seeks nothing beyond itself and desires the activity of knowing for the that activity’s own sake. That is what the man of radically servile character—give him what leisure and what fortune you please—will never understand. He will ask, ‘But what use is it?’ And finding that it cannot be eaten or drunk, nor used as an aphrodisiac, nor made an instrument for increasing his income or power, he will pronounce it to be ‘bunk.’”—C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words
“In an era in which family life has become brittle even among Christians, with chicken-hearted spouses taking the easy road of separation rather than working at their relationship, and narcissistic parents spoiling their children materially while neglecting them spiritually, there is once more much to be learned from the Puritans' very different ways.”—J.I. Packer, A Quest For Godliness
“But because the pastors could not totally assent to the Church of England as restored, the universities were barred to them and young nonconformists with them, and this meant that they could not effectively reproduce their kind.”—Packer, Ibid.
“The starting-point [of Puritan education] was their certainty that the mind must be instructed and enlightened before faith and obedience became possible. ‘Ignorance is almost every error,’ wrote Baxter, and one of his favorite maxims about preaching was ‘first light—then heat.’ Heat without light, pulpit passion without pedagogic precision, would be of no use to anyone.”—Packer, Ibid.
“It is but a cheap zeal that declaimeth [in sermons] against antiquated errors, and things now out of use and practice. We are to consider what the present age needeth.”—Thomas Manton, quoted in Packer, A Quest For Godliness
“To accept Jesus Christ as Saviour and Priest is evangelical faith; to enthrone him as Lord and King is evangelical repentance.”—Packer, Ibid.
“When Christ comes with his spiritual power upon the soul to conquer it to himself, he hath no quiet landing place. He can set foot on no ground but what he must fight for.”—John Owen, Works VI:181
“The man who claims perfection is self-deceived, and riding for a fall. ‘You’ll never get out of the seventh of Romans while I’m your minister,’ Alexander Whyte once told his Edinburgh congregation.”—Packer, Quest for Godliness
“If we would stand in the true Puritan tradition, we must seek to apply those same truths to the altered circumstances of our own day. Human nature does not change, but times do; therefore, though the application of divine truth to human life will always be the same in principle, the details of it must vary from one age to another. To content ourselves with aping the Puritans would amount to beating a mental retreat out of the twentieth century, where God has set us to live, into the seventeenth, where he has not. This is as unspiritual as it is unrealistic. The Holy Spirit is preeminently a realist, and he has been given to teach Christians how to live to God in the situation in which they are, not that in which some other saints once were. Such an attitude of mind is theologically culpable. It shows that we have shirked an essential stage in our thinking about God’s truth—that of having worked out its application to ourselves. Application may never be taken over second-hand and ready-made; each man in each generation must exercise his conscience to discern for himself how truth applies, and what it demands, in the particular situation in which he finds himself.”—Packer, Ibid.
“For what so effectually proclaims the madman as the hollow thundering of words—be they never so choice or resplendent—which have no thought or knowledge behind them?”—Cicero, De Oratore I.xii (39)
“Sublimity is the echo of a noble mind.”—Longinus, On the Sublime ix
“For art is only perfect when it looks like nature, and Nature succeeds only when she conceals latent art.”—Longinus, xxii
“In great writing, as in great wealth, there must be something overlooked. Perhaps it is inevitable that humble, mediocre natures, because they never run any risks and never aid at the heights, should remain to a large extent safe from error, while in great natures their very greatness spells danger. Nor indeed that I am ignorant of the second point, that what ever men do is always inevitably regarded from the worse side: faults make an ineradicable impression, but beauties soon slip from our memory.”—Longinus, xxxiii
“What then was the vision of those demigods who aimed only at what is greatest in writing and scorned detailed accuracy? This above all: that Nature has judged man a creature of no mean or ignoble quality, but, as if she were inviting us to some great gathering, she has called us into life, into the whole universe, there to be spectators of her games and eager competitors; and she therefore from the first breathed into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves. Thus the whole universe is not enough to satisfy the speculative intelligence of human thought; our ideas often pass beyond the limits that confine us. Look at life from all sides, and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, and you will soon realize what we were born for. So it is by some natural instinct that we admire, not the small streams (clear and useful as they are) but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and above all the Ocean. The little fire we kindle for ourselves keeps clear and steady, yet we do not therefore regard it with more amazement then the fires of heaven, which are often darkened; or think it more wonderful than the craters of Etna in eruption, hurling up rocks and whole hills from her depths and sometimes shooting forth rivers of that earthborn, sudden fire. But on all such matters I would only say this: that what is useful or necessary is easily obtained by man; it is always the unusual which wins our wonder.”—Longinus, xxxv
“His field was shorter than a Spartan letter.”—Longinus, xxxviii
“In close company with vast and unconscionable Wealth there follows step for step, as they say, Extravagance: and no sooner has one opened the gates of cities or houses, than the other comes and makes a home there too. And when they have spent some time in our lives (as the wise men tell us) they build a nest there and promptly set about begetting children: Swagger, Conceit, Luxury—no bastards, but blooded sons. And if these offspring of wealth are suffered to grow to maturity, they soon breed in pour hearts inexorable tyrants, Insolence and Disorder and Shamelessness.”—Longinus, xliv
