Commemoration of Nicholas Ferrar, Deacon, Founder of the Little Gidding Community, 1637 To me there is a much more read more

Commemoration of Nicholas Ferrar, Deacon, Founder of the Little Gidding Community, 1637 To me there is a much more frightening ignorance in our modern world than the "ignorance of the heathen". I am referring to the almost total ignorance of the content and implication of the Christian Faith shown by many "clever" people today. Frankly, I find it horrifying to discover that men who are experts in their own line -- in astronomy, genetics, or nuclear physics, for example -- have no adult knowledge of what the Church of Christ stands for, and a complete blank ignorance of what the Church is achieving today. It is the more horrifying because people who rightly respect the expert for his knowledge in his own field have no idea that he has not carefully examined and reluctantly discarded Christianity; but in all probability he has never studied it at all!

Where every day is not the Lord's, the Sunday is his least of all. There may be a sickening unreality read more

Where every day is not the Lord's, the Sunday is his least of all. There may be a sickening unreality even where there is no conscious hypocrisy.

Feast of Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, 680 Commemoration of Elizabeth, Princess of Hungary, Philanthropist, 1231 Commemoration of Mechtild, Bèguine of read more

Feast of Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, 680 Commemoration of Elizabeth, Princess of Hungary, Philanthropist, 1231 Commemoration of Mechtild, Bèguine of Magdeburg, Mystic, Prophet, 1280 JESUS, the infinite I AM, With God essentially the same, With him enthroned above all height, As God of God, and Light of Light, Thou art by thy great Father known, From all eternity his Son. Thou only dost the Father know, And wilt to all thy followers show, Who cannot doubt thy gracious will His glorious Godhead to reveal; Reveal him now, if thou art he, And live, eternal Life, in me.

Men love to trust God (as they profess) for what they have in their hands, in possession, or what lies read more

Men love to trust God (as they profess) for what they have in their hands, in possession, or what lies in an easy view; place their desires afar off, carry their accomplishment behind the clouds out of their sight, interpose difficulties and perplexities -- their hearts are instantly sick. They cannot wait for God; they do not trust Him, nor ever did. Would you have the presence of God with you? Learn to wait quietly for the salvation you expect from Him.

Feast of Andrew the Apostle I would very earnestly ask you to check your conception of Christ, the image read more

Feast of Andrew the Apostle I would very earnestly ask you to check your conception of Christ, the image of Him which as a Christian you hold in your mind, with the actual revealed Person who can be seen and studied in action in the pages of the Gospels. It may be of some value to hold in our minds a bundle of assorted ideals to influence and control our conduct. But surely we need to be very careful before we give that "bundle" the name of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

Few things are more striking than the change which has taken place during my own lifetime in the attitude of read more

Few things are more striking than the change which has taken place during my own lifetime in the attitude of the intelligentsia towards the spokesmen of Christian opinion. When I was a child, bishops expressed doubts about the Resurrection, and were called courageous. When I was a girl, G. K. Chesterton professed belief in the Resurrection, and was called whimsical. When I was at college, thoughtful people expressed belief in the Resurrection "in a spiritual sense", and were called advanced; (any other kind of belief was called obsolete, and its professors were held to be simpleminded). When I was middle-aged, a number of lay persons, including some poets and writers of popular fiction, put forward rational arguments for the Resurrection, and were called courageous. Today, any lay apologist for Christianity... whose works are sold and read, is liable to be abused in no uncertain terms as a mountebank, a reactionary, a tool of the Inquisition, a spiritual snob, an intellectual bully, an escapist, an obstructionist, a psychopathic introvert, an insensitive extrovert, and an enemy of society. The charges are not always mutually compatible, but the common animus behind them is unmistakable, and its name is fear. Writers who attack these domineering Christians are called courageous.

From the crude cry which we have so often heard during the war years: "If there is a God, why read more

From the crude cry which we have so often heard during the war years: "If there is a God, why doesn't He stop Hitler?", to the unspoken questioning in many a Christian heart when a devoted servant of Christ dies from accident or disease at what seems to us a most inopportune moment, there is this universal longing for God to intervene, to show His hand, to vindicate His purpose. I do not pretend to understand the ways of God any more than the next man; but it is surely more fitting as well as more sensible for us to study what God does do and what He does not do as He works in and through the complex fabric of this disintegrated world, than to postulate what we think God ought to do and then feel demoralized and bitterly disappointed because He fails to fulfil what we expect of Him.

Commemoration of William Wilberforce, Social Reformer, 1833 It is indeed a most lamentable consequence of the practice of regarding read more

Commemoration of William Wilberforce, Social Reformer, 1833 It is indeed a most lamentable consequence of the practice of regarding religion as a compilation of statutes, and not as an internal principle, that it soon comes to be considered as being conversant about external actions rather than about habits of mind. This sentiment sometimes has even the hardiness to insinuate and maintain itself under the guise of extraordinary concern for practical religion; but it soon discovers the falsehood of this pretension, and betrays its real nature. The expedient, indeed, of attaining to superiority in practice by not wasting any of the attention on the internal principles from which alone practice can flow, is about as reasonable, and will answer about as well, as the economy of an architect who should account it mere prodigality to expend any of his materials in laying foundation, from an idea that they might be more usefully applied to the raising of the superstructure. We know what would be the fate of such an edifice.

Feast of Vincent de Paul, Founder of the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists), 1660 If you wanted a read more

Feast of Vincent de Paul, Founder of the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists), 1660 If you wanted a label for us, would you find a better than a Sadducean Age? We also are not worrying about immortality, hardly believe in it, or at least are not sure; we, too, have limited ourselves to this dust-speck of time, leaving unclaimed the vast inheritance beyond of which Christ told us; we, too, are putting all our zeal and passion and enthusiasm into things of this earth here, quite sure that that is the only road to progress, and that this everlasting chatter about the soul is quite beside the point. And they are all so earnest and so certain, work so hard, are animated often by such lofty motives, are so sure that there is really no manner of need for Christ: that given this, and this, and this, each of them pushing forward his particular panacea -- the world will manage very well; that to talk about Christ, and changing people's hearts, and making us new creatures, is merely to lose precious time and wander from the practical into vague day-dreaming of which nothing comes. And year by year their voices grow a little harder, and they eye Christ more and more askance, feel sourly that He is a bit of a nuisance and a stumbling-block to progress, keeping people quiet who should not be quiet, lulling them with these dim, immaterial, fantastic, spiritual hopes of His which they think have no body, and can not have. Once more the whisper grows, "Were He not far better away?" Meantime we can ignore Him, they say; and they do.