I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was “Feed my sheep”, not “Try experiments on my rats”, or even “Teach my performing dogs new tricks”.
The only way to drive out bad culture is to create good culture. We need to recognize that artistic talent is a gift from the Lord – and that developing those talents is the only way to create good culture.
A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.
A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.
If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, ‘I am.’ To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him.
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
Jesus was either a Liar, a Lunatic, or Lord.
To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable in you.
In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.
You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.
All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness; was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud, uplifted wave of a journeying angels transit over and through my heart?
But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees.
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
The hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as the substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal.
When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.
Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be ‘given’ in the facts of experience.
All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.