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“As the election of 1764 showed, American democracy was built on a foundation of unbridled free speech. In the centuries since then, the nations that have thrived have been those, like America, that are most comfortable with the cacophony, and even occasional messiness, that comes from robust discourse.”
Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 217.
“To represent transhumanize in words
Impossible were; the example, then, suffice
Him from whom Grace the experience reserves.
If I was merely what of me thou newly
Createdst, Love who governest the heaven,
Thou knowest, who didst life me with thy light.”
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, “Paradiso,” Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Canto I, 70-75; It is Beatrice who is “thy light;” Dante may be referencing 2 Corinthians 12.3-4.
“The old doctrine is quite true you know – that one must attribute everything to the grace of God, and nothing to oneself. Yet as long as one is a conceited ass, there is no good pretending not to be. My self satisfaction cannot be hidden from God, whether I express it to you or not: rather the little bit of self-satisfaction which I (probably wrongly) believe myself to be fighting against, is probably merely a drop in the bottomless ocean of vanity and self-approval which the Great Eye (or Great I) sees in me.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 877; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 30 January, 1930.
“I read Grace Abounding in Everyman, having (your remember) read Mr Badman in the same volume on the way over. Grace Abounding is incomparably the better of the two. Some of the sentences in it reach right down. ‘But the milk and honey is beyond this wilderness’ – ‘I thought I could have spoken of his love and his mercy even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me’ – ‘I could not find that with all my soul I did desire deliverance.’ Of course a great part of it paints the horrors of religion and sometimes almost of insanity. What do you make of the curious temptation that assailed him just after he had been converted and felt himself united to Christ; when a voice kept saying ‘Sell Him, sell Him’: sometimes for hours at a stretch, until in mere weariness Bunyan blurted out ‘Let Him go if he will’ – which afterwards led him into despair, believing he had committed the unpardonable sin?
I suppose this is the same mental disease of which you and I have felt a trace in the impulse to throw ones new book in the fire – some strange twist that impels you to do a thing because it is precisely the one thing of all others that you don’t want to do.
I should like to know, too, in general, what you think of all the darker side of religion as we find it in old books. Formerly I regarded it as mere devil worship based on horrible superstitions. Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more, that element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly. There must be something in it: only what.
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 850; letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 22 December, 1929, on his reading of John Bunyan.
“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the more dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare [citing VG Luke 14.23, 'compel them to come in'] compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 797; Hooper inserts this quote from Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (14).
“The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel’s destiny, the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns.”
N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (Harper One: New York, 2006), 111.
“Why is the law of God irrevocable? The Bible makes that plain. Because it is rooted in the nature of God. God is righteous and that is the reason why His law is righteous. Can He then revoke His law or allow it to be disregarded? Well, there is of course no external compulsion upon Him to prevent Him from doing these things. There is none who can say to Him, ‘What doest thou?’ In that sense He can do all things. But the point is, He cannot revoke His law and still remain God. He cannot, without Himself becoming unrighteous, make His law either forbid righteousness or condone unrighteousness. When the law of God says, ‘The soul that sinneth it shall die,’ that awful penalty of death is, indeed, imposed by God’s will; but God’s will is determined by God’s nature, and God’s nature being unchangeably holy the penalty must run its course. God would be untrue to Himself, in other words, if sin were not punished; and that God should be untrue to Himself is the most impossible thing that can possibly be conceived.”
J. Gresham Machen, “The Doctrine of the Atonement,” (December 1936); Sunday radio address given three weeks prior to his death.
“We can put it briefly by saying that Christ took our place with respect to the law of God. He paid for us the law’s penalty, and he obeyed for us the law’s commands. He saved us from hell, and He earned for us our entrance into heaven. All that we have, then, we owe unto Him. There is no blessing that we have in this world or the next for which we should not give thanks.”
J. Gresham Machen, “The Doctrine of the Atonement,” (December 1936); Sunday radio address given two weeks prior to his death.
“I brought you into the world to be master of this house, and I raised you up; I am not obliged to die for you. I have received no such tradition from my ancestors that fathers should die for their children; it’s not a Greek custom. For yourself were you born, for better or for worse. You got from me all you were entitled to.”
The elder Pheres, chastising his son, Admetus. On this day, Admetus’ wife, Alcestis, died sacrificially that her husband’s life would be preserved; Euripides (485-406 BC), Alcestis (Translation by Moses Hadas and John McLean), lines 681ff.
