“The proposition that the United States of America are a Christian and Protestant nation, is not so much the assertion of a principle as the statement of a fact.”
-Charles Hodge
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Charles Hodge on the limits of using natural law with the natural man:
“The experience of ages proves that the world by wisdom knows not God. The heathen nations, ancient and modern, civilized and savage, have without exception, failed by the light of nature to solve any of the great problems of humanity. This is the testimony of history as well as of Scripture.”
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“Those, indeed, who rule for the public good, are true examples and specimens of his beneficence, while those who domineer unjustly and tyrannically are raised up by Him to punish the people for their iniquity.”
– John Calvin, Institutes 4.20.25
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“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
— Simone Weil
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“To be at home on the earth, to be rooted in a place, is to know it in a way that cannot be replaced by abstractions or by mere mobility.”
—- Wendell Berry
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“I think I warned you before that if your patient can’t be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don’t mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is, the better. And it isn’t the doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice. The real fun is working up hatred between those who say “mass” and those who say “holy communion” when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker’s doctrine and Thomas Aquinas’, in any form which would hold water for five minutes. And all the purely indifferent things–candles and clothes and what not–are an admirable ground for our activities. We have quite removed from men’s minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials–namely, that the human without scruples should always give way to the human with scruples. You would think they could not fail to see the application. You would expect to find the “low” churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his “high” brother should be moved to irreverence, and the “high” one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his “low” brother into idolatry.”
–C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times, and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is in the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.— Teddy Roosevelt
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“The faithful must hold the trowel in one hand and the sword in the other, because the building of the church must still be combined with many struggles.”
— John Calvin, on the duty of Christians to fight and build
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In the Old Testament the New is concealed, in the New the Old is revealed
— Augustine
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Sin is sweet in commission, but bitter in remembrance.
— Thomas Manton
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Höpfl summarizing Calvin on the purpose of civil government:
“ The business of magistrates, to sum up, is to enforce both justice and godliness. Even without Scripture, men know (according to Calvin) that the honour of God and the care of religion are the principal duties of government, but without the light of Scripture they know nothing whatever about true religion or the right honour and worship of God. As to external justice and righteousness, its content is to some extent known.”
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“People do not believe lies because they have to but because they want to.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
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Dabney on ordered liberty:
“What, then, is man’s natural liberty? We answer, that it is only privilege to do whatever he has a moral right to do.”
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To enjoy God is the center of our rest and the fountain of our blessedness and the chief end for which we were made. It is our business to seek him, and our happiness to enjoy him,
— Thomas Manton
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Faith is the fountain of prayer, and prayer should be nothing else but faith exercised.
— Thomas Manton
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