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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 filmmaking process is slow and expensive, so movies are always the last idiom to respond to social evolution; the finest films from the seventies were really just the manifestation of how art and life had changed in the sixties.”
Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (New York: Scribner, 2004), 163.
“Somewhat she [Beatrice] smiled; and then, ‘If the opinion
Of mortals be erroneous,’ she said,
‘Where’er the key of sense doth not unlock,
Certes, the shafts of wonder should not pierce thee
Now, forasmuch as, following the senses,
Thou seest that the reason has short wings.
But tell me what thou think’st of it thyself.’”
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, “Paradiso,” Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Canto II, 52-58.
“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.
“‘. . . among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the course of their lives, all the rest are baubles, besides old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.’”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 700; written to his father, dated 28 May, 1927; citing (from memory, of course!), the words of Alphonsus, King of Aragon found in Essays of Sir William Temple, vol. 2 (1822), 93-4.
“About powers other than reason – I would be sorry if you mistook my position [opposition to the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner]. Not one is more convinced than I that reason is utterly inadequate to the richness and spirituality of real things: indeed this is itself a deliverance of reason. Nor do I doubt the presence, even in us, of faculties embryonic or atrophied, that lie in an indefinite margin around the little finite bit of focus which is intelligence – faculties anticipating or remembering the possession of huge tracts of reality that slip through the meshes of the intellect. And, to be sure, I believe that the symbols presented by imagination at its height are the workings of that fringe and present to us as much of the super-intelligible reality as we can get while we retain our present form of consciousness.
My scepticism begins when people offer me explicit accounts of the super-intelligible and in so doing use all the categories of the intellect. . . . At all events if more knowledge is to come, it must be the wordless & thoughtless knowledge of the mystic: not the celestial statistics of Swedenborg, the Lemurian history of Steiner, or the demonology of the Platonists. All this seems to me merely an attempt to know the super-intelligible as if it were a new slice of the intelligible: as though a man with a bad cold tried to get back smells with a microscope.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 670-71; written to his friend, Cecil Harwood, dated 28 October, 1926.
“He hardly realizes – how could he at his age – with what a liberal hand nature has bestowed her bounties on him.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 178; written by Mr. Kirkpatrick, C. S. Lewis’ tutor at Great Bookham, Surrey, in a letter to Albert Lewis dated 7 April, 1916.
