… So Donal lives a present power of heat and light in the place. Most of his early friends are gone, but he wears yet the same solemn look, with the same hovering smile. It seems to say to those who can read it, “I know in whom I have believed” … “God is,” he will say, coming out of one of his talking moods; “God is, and all is well.” When he has said that, he never says anything more, but listens only to those about him. He never disputes, rarely seeks to convince. “I will do what I can to let what light I have shine; but disputation is smoke, and serves only to obscure the light. It is to no profit – and I do like,” he will say, “to give and to get the good of things!”

    — George MacDonald, Donal Grant

To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse … the only way to make them good is to be good – remembering well the beam and the mote … the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.

          — George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie

Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin.  Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth …

At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love.  Always decide to use humble love.  If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world.  Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it …

If the evil-doing of men moves you to indignation and overwhelming distress, even to a desire for vengeance on the evil-doers, shun above all things that feeling.  Go at once and seek suffering for yourself, as though you were yourself guilty of that wrong.  Accept that suffering and bear it and your heart will find comfort, and you will understand that you too are guilty … 

           —  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

… We have taught the fundamental distinction between the original mission of Christ and whatever form a state, including the present one, may take … The discipleship of Jesus Christ as our Brethren try to live it means practicing the healing love of God, not representing his wrath and judgment.  For our conscience, therefore, the old sacred order of creation of family and nation is subordinated to the new creation of the Spirit:  the church of Christ and the kingdom of God.  The discipline of the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ, who cleanses and unites, replaces the severity of military, political, and legal measures.

— Eberhard Arnold, Letter to Gestapo Officials, Dec. 6, 1933

My own picture of the future is that our society is going in the next decades to be totally non-Christian; I mean its institutions, everything about it, will lose whatever relationship they now have with Christian religion. Then, I think, there will be people, in the very stressful circumstances that are likely to arise, who will still want to live as Christians, and I think they are much more likely to find themselves in the position of a Christian underground, a sort of maquis. I imagine the forces of paganism occupying our world, and the Christians drawn together in those conditions, rather as I remember surviving Christians in the U.S.S.R., who appealed to me very much. They seemed to me to be enormously pure – simply a collection of people who, in extremely hostile circumstances, clung to their faith, and tried to cling to their Christian way of life. This might easily happen, and I hope that if I were still alive, I should be among those people.

— Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered (1969)

Lord! How I loathe great issues. How I wish they were all adjourned sine die. “Dynamic” I think is one of the words invented by this age which sums up what it likes and I abominate. Could one start a Stagnation Party – which at the General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?

— C. S. Lewis, letter to his brother, 1940

If physicians did not have long gowns and mules, if learned doctors did not wear square caps and robes four times too large, they would never have deceived the world, which finds such an authentic display irresistible.

We have only to see a lawyer in cap and gown to form a favorable opinion of his confidence.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 40, 41 

Pondered Doremus: Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated – tortured – slaughtered!

“Is it just possible,” he sighed, “that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls who have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on saving them?”

                          — Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

                                                Let a vast assembly be,

                                                And with great solemnity

                                                Declare with measured words that ye

                                                Are, as God made ye, free –

                                                Be your strong and simple words

                                                Keen to wound as sharpened swords,

                                                And wide as targes let them be,

                                                With their shade to cover ye.

                                                And if then the tyrants dare,

                                                Let them ride among you there,

                                                Slash and stab and maim and hew, –

                                              What they like, that let them do.

                                                With folded arms and steady eyes,

                                                And little fear and less surprise,

                                                Look upon them as they slay,

                                                Till their rage has died away.

                                                And that slaughter to the Nation

                                                Shall steam up like inspiration,

                                                Eloquent, oracular;

                                                A volcano heard afar.

              — Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Mask of Anarchy”

(Quoted in George MacDonald’s Donal Grant)

I have very little idea of what is going on in the world, but occasionally I happen to see some of the things they are drawing and writing there and it gives me the conviction that they are all living in ash cans. It makes me glad I cannot hear what they are singing.

— Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation  

… So God became man.  He took on the weakness and ordinariness of man, and He hid Himself, becoming an anonymous and unimportant man in a very unimportant place.  And he refused at any time to Lord it over men, or to be a King, or to be a Leader, or to be a Reformer, or to be in any way Superior to His own creatures.  He would be nothing else but their brother, and their counsellor, and their servant, and their friend.  He was in no accepted human sense an important person, though since that time we have made Him The Most Important Person.  That is another matter:  for though it is quite true that he is the King and Lord of all, the conqueror of death, the judge of the living and of the dead, the Pantokrator, yet He is also still the Son of Man, the hidden one, unknown, unremarkable, vulnerable.  He can be killed.  And when the Son of Man was put to death, He rose again from the dead, and was again with us, for he said:  “Kill me, it does not matter.”

                                                — Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation    

Let us then as Christians rejoice that we see around us on every hand the decay of the institutions and instruments of power, see intimations of empires falling to pieces, money in total disarray, dictators and parliamentarians alike nonplussed by the confusion and conflicts which encompass them.  For it is precisely when every earthly hope has been explored and found wanting, when every possibility of help from earthly sources has been sought and is not forthcoming, when every recourse this world offers, moral as well as material, has been explored to no effect, when in the shivering cold the last faggot has been thrown on the fire and in the gathering darkness every glimmer of light has finally flickered out, it’s then that Christ’s hand reaches out sure and firm.  Then Christ’s words bring their inexpressible comfort, then his light shines brightest, abolishing the darkness forever.  So, finding in everything only deception and nothingness, the soul is constrained to have recourse to God himself and to rest content with him.

— Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

Diversion.  Men chase a ball or a hare.  It is the very sport of kings.

         — Blaise Pascal, Pensees.  

“Why are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder?  The idea dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred; — but what for the wretches they hire and kill?  The cheapness of man is every day’s tragedy.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Uses of Great Men”

I was enchanted when I first read in the Pensées … about how magistrates and rulers had to be garbed in their ridiculous ceremonial robes, crowns, and diadems.  Otherwise, who would not see through their threadbare pretensions?  I am conscious of having been ruled by buffoons, taught by idiots, preached at by hypocrites, and preyed upon by charlatans in the guise of advertisers and other professional persuaders, as well as by demagogues and ideologues of many opinions, all false.

–Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered