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“It may be inquired, How God assists natural conscience so as to convince the sinner of his desert of hell? I answer,
In general, it is by light. The whole work of God is carried on in the heart of man from his first convictions to his conversion by light. It is by discoveries which are made to his soul. but by what light is it, that a sinner is made sensible that he deserves God’s wrath? It is some discovery that he has, which makes him sensible of the heinousness of disobeying and casting contempt upon God. The light which gives evangelical humiliation, and which makes man sensible of that hateful and odious nature of sin, is a discovery of God’s glory and excellence and grace. But what is it which a natural man sees of God, which makes him sensible that sin against God deserves his wrath; for he sees nothing of the excellence and loveliness of God’s glory and grace? I answer,
Particularly, it seems to be discovery of God’s awful and terrible greatness. Natural men cannot see any thing of God’s loveliness, his amiable and glorious grace, or any thing which should attract their love; but they may see his terrible greatness to excite their terror. Wicked men in another world, though they do not see his loveliness and grace, yet they see his awful greatness, and that makes them sensible of the heinousness of sin.”
Jonathan Edwards, Sermon on Hosea 5.15 (Works, 2.833); cited in T. M. Moore, Consider the Lilies: A Plea for Creational Theology (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2005), 152, n. 18.
“The Israelites knew that if God did not consume the sacrifice he would consume the worshippers.”
D. G. Hart and John Muether, With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship (Phillipsburg: P & R, 2002), 123.
“The Bible regards reverence and joy not as opposites that we turn on and off during worship, but at mutually reinforcing, just as the death and resurrection of Christ nurture both humility and celebration.”
D. G. Hart and John Muether, With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship (Phillipsburg: P & R, 2002), 20.
“I think the trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God’s existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address. Mind you I don’t think so – the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so. However, there is nothing to do but to peg away. One falls so often that it hardly seems worth while picking oneself up and going through the farce of starting over again as if you could ever hope to walk. Still, this seeming absurdity is the only sensible thing I do, so I must continue it. And all the time, on the other side, the imaginative side, (the fairy angel) I get such glimpses and vanishing memories as often take my breath away: as if they said ‘Look what you’re losing’ – as if they were there just to deprive one of all excuse.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 944-45; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 24 December, 1930.
“Arthur, whatever you do never allow yourself to get a neurosis. You and I are both qualified for it, because we both were afraid of our fathers as children. . . . But it can be avoided. Keep clear of introspection, of brooding, of spiritualism, of everything eccentric. Keep to work and sanity and open air – to the cheerful & the matter of fact side of things. We hold our mental health by a thread: & nothing is worth risking for it. Above all beware of excessive day dreaming, of seeing yourself in the centre of a drama, of self pity, and, as far as possible, of fears.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 605; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 22 April, 1923.
“You will be surprised and I expect, not a little amused to hear that my views at present are getting almost monastic about all the lusts of the flesh. They seem to me to extend the dominion of matter over us: and, out here, where I see spirit continually dodging matter (shells, bullets, animal fears, animal pains) I have formulated my equation Matter = Nature = Satan. And on the other side Beauty, the only spiritual & not-natural thing that I have yet found.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 371; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 23 May, 1918.
“I always suspected that it was not so much because she was deaf that she couldn’t hear, but because there was so much she didn’t want to hear that she chose to be deaf.”
Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart: A Memoir of the Lost and Found (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), 15.
“Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.”
Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge.
“Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil.”
Words of Gabriel Syme, who is meeting, for the first time, a real spiritual threat in the form of a very large (physically) adversary; G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday.
“[Augustine’s] psychological analysis anticipated parts of Freud: he first discovered the existence of the ‘sub-conscious.’”
Henry Chadwick, Augustine, Past Masters Series (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 3.
