“There is a kind of pedantry common to all the crafts which derives from the exaggeration and intemperance of those who practice them, making those affected by it seem extravagant and ridiculous. We smile with indulgence upon those drudges of the "republic of letters" who bury themselves in the learned dust of antiquity for the good of knowledge, bestow the light from this darkness upon the human
"You must not think that these priests were idle, or occupied only with sacrifices. An altogether greater responsibility and a greater burden were imposed on them: namely, to be the keepers and interpreters of doctrine and the judges of the most serious disputes. Their profession comprised education, divine law, history, the classification of time periods, the patterns of the year (by establishing the turning points from the observation of the heavens), the investigation of nature, the medical art, and finally music. It was among their foremost duties to report, in good faith, in the public records the deeds accomplished among God’s people, so that a continuous sequence of history existed in the Church. For God wanted all the past times to be known to posterity, so that they might have certain evidence of His doctrine. For God did not want our minds to waver, without knowing of the beginning of the world, the beginning of religion, its spread, its perversions and renewal. Therefore, He wanted a history of all times—short, but containing the highest things—to be always present in the Church, and He preserved it. What then was that assembly of priests other than a school or an academy, set up in an excellent way?”—Philip Melanchthon, “Oration on the Role of Schools” in Philip Melanchthon: Essays on Philosophy and Education
“They lived with their mother in a house so artistic that you broke your head whichever way you turned in it.”—John Buchan, Mr. Standfast
“He contradicted everything you said, and looked out for an argument as other people look for their dinner. He was a double-engined, high-speed pacifist, because he was the kind of cantankerous fellow who must always be in the minority…the world was all crooked for Letchford, and God had created him with two left hands.”—Buchan
“We fortify ourselves in opposition to God when we view this world as our sphere and this earth as our domain. God has his heaven, and we have this earth, and a bartering ensues in which, after death, God allocates to us a piece of his heaven, while we, in exchange, give God during our earthly life a piece of this earthly life, as it were. And then, of course, a somewhat businesslike mind-set governs in this sacred realm as well, by which we attempt to purchase as large a piece of heaven as possible by sacrificing as small a piece of this earthly life as possible.”—Kuyper, Common Grace II
“If, regrettably, people have become accustomed to underestimating what happens through mediation, as if God’s majesty shone only in the immediate, then the result is that the revelation of God’s majesty is diminished. In this way the influence of religion itself is lessened by the increase in our knowledge of nature. The end result is that some people become fanatical about natural science while closing their eyes to the majesty of God, while others, which to uphold the glory of the God, end up resenting natural science as if it were black magic from the evil one.”—Kuyper
“What the physicist must not do in observing many intermediate causes in the universe is to close his eyes to the God who links these various causes together. And what we as believers must not do is to ignore this chain of causes, for the simple reason that it is God who links all these causes together.”—Kuyper
“’What is man that you are mindful of him?’ But God has placed that same puny man over all his creation and made all things subject to him—not magically, but by granting him in his spiritual existence a power that, provided it is developed, far exceeds all other traits manifest among God’s creatures. Thus a simple comparison of human beings and animals demonstrates fairly conclusively that the assistance of human life through various means corresponds to a higher form of life than direct divine impartation.”—Kuyper
“Moreover, even in this life there is no virtue except that of loving what ought to be loved. Good sense consists in choosing that, courage in allowing no hardships, moderation in allowing no temptations, justice in allowing no pride, to divert one from it. What should we choose to love particularly, if not the one thing we can find that is unsurpassed? This is God; and if in loving anything else we make it preferable or equal to him, we have forgotten how to love ourselves. The nearer we approach to him the better it is for us; for nothing is better than him. We approach him, however, not by moving, but by loving….we reach him then not by foot, but by character.”—Augustine of Hippo, Letter #155, in Augustine: Political Writings
“Teachers of the Law, you have heard the guardian of the Law, but you haven’t yet recognized him as the maker of the Law. What did you think it meant when he wrote on the ground with his finger? The Law was written by the finger of God, but it was written on stone because they were hard. And now the Lord was writing on earth, because he was looking for fruit.”—Augustine of Hippo, Commentary on the Gospel of John in Augustine: Political Writings
