“Nec promiscuam habere ac vulgarem clementiam oportet nec abscisam; nam tam omnibus ignoscere crudelitas quam nulli.” (Neither should we have indiscriminate and general mercy, nor yet preclude it; for it is as much a cruelty to pardon all as to pardon none.)—Seneca, De Clementia I.ii
“Principum saevitia, bellum est.”—Seneca, De Clementia I.v
“The Christian, when fullest of divine communications, is but a glass without a foot; he cannot stand, or hold what he hath received, any longer than God holds him in his strong hand.”—William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour
“Many lose heaven, because they are ashamed to go in a fool’s coat thither.”—Gurnall
“Obedience, being a child of faith, partakes of its parent’s strength or weakness.”—Gurnall
“They say writing is just pushing a feather, but… writing occupies not just the fist or the foot while the rest of the body can be singing or jesting, but the whole man. As for school teaching, it is so strenuous that no one ought to be bound to it for more than ten years.”—Martin Luther, in Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand
“When God argues, history happens.”—C.R. Wiley, The Great Awokening Podcast “The Christian Household”
“All that Nature spins time will unravel, to the eternal confusion of all who are clothed therein.”—Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
“Some academic disciplines, especially those in the social sciences, are profoundly anti-Christian in their effect, and it is difficult to counter that effect by dealing with their evidence or their arguments. The evidence is often good and the arguments sound. It is the assumptions we must question.”—Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction
“Anyone convinced that X is the wave of the future is tempted mightily to enter the struggle on the victory side. Certain that he is on the team that the future will vindicate, the historicist fights with abandon; tepidity is only for people with doubts.”—Schlossberg
“A society that cannot tolerate a judge beyond history will find that it can learn to tolerate anything else.”—Schlossberg
“Mind has to be a prescientific concept for a metaphysic that believes all reality to be material.”—Schlossberg
“Warnings about the rule of intellectuals come mainly from intellectuals. (Perhaps because once one has attended a faculty meeting, it is much harder to imagine that the participants possess the secrets of divine wisdom and objectivity.)”—Schlossberg
“Thomas Jefferson, though a Deist, could write in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” because biblical thinking underlay the fabric of the society in which he came to maturity. In a different context such ideas would have been far from “self-evident” truths. After biblical faith wanes, a people can maintain habits of thought and of self-restraint. The ethic remains after the faith that bore it departs. But eventually a generation arises that no longer has the habit, and that is when the behavior changes radically. When Israel began worshipping the Canaanite gods, it was only a matter of time before the nation began shedding innocent blood (Ps. 106:34-39). There is no protection against this in statutes or constitutions, which becomes scraps of paper when people come to despise the law that stands behind them. We learn historicist notions of destiny in the schools and find it hard to imagine the fragility of our institutions. They can survive the domination of wicked people in high places, and they often have; but they cannot long survive the people’s insistence that wickedness be dominant, the continual boast that evil is good.”—Schlossberg
