Fragments

‘Let it stand, therefore, as an indubitable truth, which no engines can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God that he cannot conceive, desire, or design any thing but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure, and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly envenomed by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness; that if some men occasionally make a show of goodness, their mind is ever interwoven with hypocrisy and deceit, their soul inwardly bound with the fetters of wickedness.’

‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.’

‘Regarding the Old Testament as the Word of God radically alters the task of writing the history of Israel by raising it to the level of a theological activity. If we grant that the writing of Israel’s history and the writing of the history of any other people are on entirely different planes precisely because, in the former case, history and theology cannot be separated, we must be willing to admit that the kind of healthy skepticism that is a necessary part of conventional historiography has no place in our work. By virtue of our confession that we are under the authority of the very sources we are investigating, we have already surrendered our right to reject what we cannot understand or what we find difficult to believe.’

‘Welcome, all wonders in one sight! Eternity shut in a span! Summer in Winter, Day in Night! Heaven in Earth, and God in Man! Great little one! Whose all embracing birth, Lifts Earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to Earth.’

‘A presupposition is a belief that takes precedence over another and therefore serves as a criterion for another. An ultimate presupposition is a belief over which no other takes precedence. For a Christian, the content of Scripture must serve as his ultimate presupposition.... This doctrine is merely the outworking of the lordship of God in the area of human thought. It merely applies the doctrine of scriptural infallibility to the realm of knowing.’

‘The Divine law was upheld and vindicated in Christ’

‘Whatever understanding one may have of the covenant of Israel, the fact simply has to be accepted that God has called a people into being which consists of Jews and Gentiles together, with no distinction. This fact alone shows that God himself does not operate with an understanding of the old covenant which preserves that distinction between Jews and Gentiles... Paul rejects his opponents essentially sentimental understanding of the Old Testament and the covenant with Israel, which regarded God as a constitutional Monarch, simply signing all the bills sent to him. No! insists Paul, he is an executive Monarch, managing his people within the framework of his promises, even if this means making decisions hard for his subjects to understand.’

Those who have said that original sin is “concupiscence” have used an appropriate word, if only it be added — something that most will by no means concede — that whatever is in man, from the understanding to the will, from the soul even to the flesh, has been defiled and crammed with this concupiscence. Or, to put it more briefly, the whole man is of himself nothing but concupiscence.

“Life’s battle is primarily a moral battle.”

‘ I cannot think on the one without quickly being encircled by the splendor of the three; nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the one.’

There are nights that are so still that I can hear the small owl calling far off and a fox barking miles away. It is then that I lie in the lean hours awake listening to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic rising and falling, rising and falling wave on wave on the long shore by the village, that is without light and companionless. And the thought comes of that other being who is awake, too, letting our prayers break on him, not like this for a few hours, but for days, years, for eternity.

"Upon my mind, weighed down with woe, Crowd thoughts a heavy multitude: In silence memory unfolds Her long, long scroll before my eyes. Loathing and shuddering I curse And bitterly lament in vain, And bitter though the tears I weep I do not wash those lines away."

“People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.” 

Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.

“Know then that there is nothing more lofty, nor more powerful, nor more healthy nor more useful later in life than some good memory, and particularly one that has been borne from childhood, from one’s parents home. Much is said to you about your education, but a beautiful, sacred memory like that, one preserved from childhood, is possibly the best education of all.”

“Christ therefore is the priest, and the same one is also the sacrificial victim, the price of our reconciliation who on the altar of the cross offered himself not to the Devil, but to the Trinity, on behalf of all, in so far as it pertains to the sufficiency of the price, but for the elect alone, in so far as it pertains to efficacy, because he has effected salvation for the predestined alone.”