"Vos orate Dominum, ut quod voce hominis infertur auribus vestris, idipsum digito dei vestris inscribatur cordibus." (Pray to the Lord, that these words, by which man’s voice is brought to your ears, may by the finger of God be written in your hearts.)—Henry Bullinger, Decades I.5
“I am not, of course, maintaining that theology, even before you believe it, is totally bare of aesthetic value. But I do not find it superior in this respect to most of its rivals. Consider for a few moments the enormous aesthetic claim of its chief contemporary rival—what we may loosely call the scientific outlook, the picture of Mr. H.G. Wells and the rest. Supposing this to be a myth, is it not one of the finest myths which human imagination has yet produced? The play is preceded by the most austere of all preludes: the infinite void, and matter restlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then, by the millionth millionth chance—what tragic irony—the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which is the beginning of life. Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama—just as everything seems to against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy tale. But life somehow wins through. With infinite suffering, against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself, from the amoeba up to the plant, up to the reptile, up to the mammal. We glanced briefly at the age of monsters. Dragons prowl the earth, devour one another, and die. Then comes the theme of the younger son in the ugly duckling once more. As the weak, tiny spark of life began amidst the huge hostilities of the inanimate, so now again, amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little naked, shivering, cowering creature, shuffling, not yet erect, promising nothing, the product of another millionth millionth chance. Yet somehow he thrives. He becomes the caveman with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemy’s bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I never could quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces and fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the horrible gods whom he has created in his own image. But these are only growing pains. Wait till the next act. There he is becoming true Man. He learns to master Nature. Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the present (for it is a mere nothing by the time scale we are using), you follow him on into the future. See him in the last act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rules the planet—and perhaps more than the planet—for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psychoanalysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity require shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Henceforward he has nothing to do but to practice virtue, grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little bathetic. It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable. The last scene reverses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of reach of human power, nature, the old enemy, has been gnawing steadily away. The sun will cool—all suns will cool—the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be vanished, without hope of return, from every inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness, and “universal darkness covers all.” The pattern of the myth thus becomes one of the noblest we can conceive. It is the pattern of many Elizabethan tragedies, where the protagonist’s career can be represented by a slowly ascending and then rapidly falling curve, with its highest point in Act IV. You see him climbing up and up, then blazing in his bright meridian, then finally overwhelmed in ruin.
Such a world drama appeals to every part of us. The early struggles of the hero (a theme delightfully doubled, played first by life, and then by man) appeal to our generosity. His future exaltation gives scope to a reasonable optimism, for the tragic close is so very distant that you need not often think of it —we work with millions of years. And the tragic close itself just gives that irony, that grandeur, which calls for our defiance, and with all the rest might cloy. There is a beauty in this myth which well deserves better poetic handling than it has yet received; I hope some great genius will yet crystallize it before the incessant stream of philosophic change carries it all away. I am speaking of course, of the beauty it has whether you believe it or not. There I could speak from experience, for I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate it. The only other story—unless, indeed, it is an embodiment of the same story— which similarly moves me is the Nibelung’s Ring.”—C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
“Caecina and Valens quietly watched for their enemy's imprudence to end in ruin, and, employing a common substitute for wisdom, waited to profit by their opponents' folly.”—Tacitus, Histories II.34“For the faithful are purely cleansed by Christ, who washeth them with his blood; and but yet, because the flesh doth strive with the Spirit so long as life remaineth on the earth, therefore the godly have need with faith and the Holy Ghost to wash and wipe their feet.”—Bullinger, Decades I.IX
“I would to God the magistrates would more sincerely set forth the worship of God among the people: or else, if this may not be obtained at their hands, yet then at least that they would be no worse nor godless than Caiaphas, who, when he heard (as he thought) blasphemy against the name of God, did rent his clothes, and cry, that the blasphemer was worthy to die. For surely, unless our Christian magistrates do become more sharp and severe against blaspheming villainies, I do not see but that they must needs be a great deal worse than the wicked knave Caiaphas.”—Bullinger, Decades II.III
“And each and every individual a flashing prism of gaudy silks and velvets—well, I never saw anything to begin with it but a fight between an Upper Mississippi sunset and the aurora borealis.”— Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
“I would have supposed that something more in the nature of a plumed knight or a corsair of the deep would have been her ideal. But, of course, if there is a branch of modern industry where the demand is greater than the supply, it is the manufacture of knights and corsairs; and nowadays a girl, however flaming her aspirations, has to take the best she can get.”—Wodehouse, The Clicking of Cuthbert
“But I am diffident. What’s the good of saying I mustn’t be diffident when I’m the man who wrote the words and music, when Diffidence is my middle name and my telegraphic address? I can’t help being diffident.”
“The George Mackintosh I had known had had a pleasing gaze, but, though frank and agreeable, it had never been more dynamic than a fried egg. This new George had an eye that was a combination of a gimlet and a searchlight.”
“By the time he reached men’s estate, Ramsden Waters had about as much ferocity and self assertion as a blanc mange.”
“Humane igitur imbecillitatis efficacissimum duramentum est necessitas.” (Thus the most effective hardener of human weakness is necessity)—Valerius Maximus, II.7
“Why didn’t somebody tell me about this earlier? I figured out why: nobody had known. A kind of collective amnesia set in after 1936, and even prior to 1936. The victims never did fully understand what had happened to them, and the perpetrators were not about to tell them or anybody else.”— Gary North, Crossed Fingers
“There must be negative sanctions. Excommunication and removal from ordained office are essential to the maintenance of any ecclesiastical greater confession, and ultimately every organization has a process of excommunication, for they all have implicit greed the experientialists are not exceptions to this rule. They want pee so much, they are willing to fight for it. They want unity so much, they are willing to excommunicate creedalists in order to maintain it.”
“If there is neither definitive nor final sanctification, then all there can be is change: history without a sovereign, permanent decree. The only temporal boundaries for reality are the impersonal Big Bang at the beginning of time and entropy’s impersonal heat death of the universe at the end. Neither has anything to do with ethical standards or eternal judgment. Life is then just a question of entropy: the irrevocable loss of heat— cosmically meaningless heat. Better this, the liberal says, than eternally meaningful heat.”
“…through the imposition of wholesale removal or retail excommunication (one trial at a time)."
“The lack of common ethical ground is why the conservatives insistence that the modernists leave the Presbyterian Church fell on judicially deaf ears. This demand merely amused the liberals. Why should they leave? The modernists were Progressives. They believed in democracy as a process. They also believed in bureaucracy as a structure promoting reform. They believed in reform, but they believed that reform comes only because a dedicated elite operates self-consciously within the democratic process to guide it.”
“Orthodox men were up in arms—small-caliber, as always…”
“Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them and so perhaps it would, if they had it.”— Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles
“There is no subtle spiritual evil in the fact that people always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable.”
“Boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world period to love anything is to love its boundaries; thus children will always play on the edge of anything. They build castles on the edge of the sea, and can only be restrained by public proclamation and private violence from walking on the edge of the grass. For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come to the beginning of it.”
“Today one traveled quickly. The science had changed all. For our fathers, they were religious, and (what was worse) dead.”
“For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a tea party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence.”
“Then I suddenly saw that there was a symbolic division which might be paralleled from biology. Brave men are vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle. For these modern cowards are all crustaceans; their hardness is all in the cover and their softness is inside.”
“One thing especially filled my soul with the soul of my fathers. Each man speaking, whether he spoke well or ill, spoke as well as he could from sheer fury against the other man. This is the greatest of our modern modern descents, that nowadays a man does not become more rhetorical as he becomes more sincere. An 18th -century speaker, when he got really and honestly furious, looked for big words with which to crush his adversary. The new speaker looks for small words to crush him with. He looks for little facts and little sneers.”
“You may suppose me, for the sake of argument, sitting at lunch in one of those quick-lunch restaurants in the City where men take their food so fast that it has none of the quality of food, and take their half-hour’s vacation so fast that it has none of the qualities of leisure; to hurry through one’s leisure is the most unbusinesslike of actions.”
“In short, they were the slaves of the modern bondage, you could hear their fetters clanking. Each was, in fact, bound by a chain; the heaviest chain ever tied to a man—it is called a watch-chain.”
“I would to God the magistrates would more sincerely set forth the worship of God among the people: or else, if this may not be obtained at their hands, yet then at least that they would be no worse nor godless than Caiaphas, who, when he heard (as he thought) blasphemy against the name of God, did rent his clothes, and cry, that the blasphemer was worthy to die. For surely, unless our Christian magistrates do become more sharp and severe against blaspheming villainies, I do not see but that they must needs be a great deal worse than the wicked knave Caiaphas.”—Bullinger, Decades II.III
“And each and every individual a flashing prism of gaudy silks and velvets—well, I never saw anything to begin with it but a fight between an Upper Mississippi sunset and the aurora borealis.”— Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
“I would have supposed that something more in the nature of a plumed knight or a corsair of the deep would have been her ideal. But, of course, if there is a branch of modern industry where the demand is greater than the supply, it is the manufacture of knights and corsairs; and nowadays a girl, however flaming her aspirations, has to take the best she can get.”—Wodehouse, The Clicking of Cuthbert
“But I am diffident. What’s the good of saying I mustn’t be diffident when I’m the man who wrote the words and music, when Diffidence is my middle name and my telegraphic address? I can’t help being diffident.”
“The George Mackintosh I had known had had a pleasing gaze, but, though frank and agreeable, it had never been more dynamic than a fried egg. This new George had an eye that was a combination of a gimlet and a searchlight.”
“By the time he reached men’s estate, Ramsden Waters had about as much ferocity and self assertion as a blanc mange.”
“Humane igitur imbecillitatis efficacissimum duramentum est necessitas.” (Thus the most effective hardener of human weakness is necessity)—Valerius Maximus, II.7
“Why didn’t somebody tell me about this earlier? I figured out why: nobody had known. A kind of collective amnesia set in after 1936, and even prior to 1936. The victims never did fully understand what had happened to them, and the perpetrators were not about to tell them or anybody else.”— Gary North, Crossed Fingers
“There must be negative sanctions. Excommunication and removal from ordained office are essential to the maintenance of any ecclesiastical greater confession, and ultimately every organization has a process of excommunication, for they all have implicit greed the experientialists are not exceptions to this rule. They want pee so much, they are willing to fight for it. They want unity so much, they are willing to excommunicate creedalists in order to maintain it.”
“If there is neither definitive nor final sanctification, then all there can be is change: history without a sovereign, permanent decree. The only temporal boundaries for reality are the impersonal Big Bang at the beginning of time and entropy’s impersonal heat death of the universe at the end. Neither has anything to do with ethical standards or eternal judgment. Life is then just a question of entropy: the irrevocable loss of heat— cosmically meaningless heat. Better this, the liberal says, than eternally meaningful heat.”
“…through the imposition of wholesale removal or retail excommunication (one trial at a time)."
“The lack of common ethical ground is why the conservatives insistence that the modernists leave the Presbyterian Church fell on judicially deaf ears. This demand merely amused the liberals. Why should they leave? The modernists were Progressives. They believed in democracy as a process. They also believed in bureaucracy as a structure promoting reform. They believed in reform, but they believed that reform comes only because a dedicated elite operates self-consciously within the democratic process to guide it.”
“Orthodox men were up in arms—small-caliber, as always…”
“Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them and so perhaps it would, if they had it.”— Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles
“There is no subtle spiritual evil in the fact that people always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable.”
“Boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world period to love anything is to love its boundaries; thus children will always play on the edge of anything. They build castles on the edge of the sea, and can only be restrained by public proclamation and private violence from walking on the edge of the grass. For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come to the beginning of it.”
“Today one traveled quickly. The science had changed all. For our fathers, they were religious, and (what was worse) dead.”
“For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a tea party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence.”
“Then I suddenly saw that there was a symbolic division which might be paralleled from biology. Brave men are vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle. For these modern cowards are all crustaceans; their hardness is all in the cover and their softness is inside.”
“One thing especially filled my soul with the soul of my fathers. Each man speaking, whether he spoke well or ill, spoke as well as he could from sheer fury against the other man. This is the greatest of our modern modern descents, that nowadays a man does not become more rhetorical as he becomes more sincere. An 18th -century speaker, when he got really and honestly furious, looked for big words with which to crush his adversary. The new speaker looks for small words to crush him with. He looks for little facts and little sneers.”
“You may suppose me, for the sake of argument, sitting at lunch in one of those quick-lunch restaurants in the City where men take their food so fast that it has none of the quality of food, and take their half-hour’s vacation so fast that it has none of the qualities of leisure; to hurry through one’s leisure is the most unbusinesslike of actions.”
“In short, they were the slaves of the modern bondage, you could hear their fetters clanking. Each was, in fact, bound by a chain; the heaviest chain ever tied to a man—it is called a watch-chain.”
