"A prophet without a gospel is worse than a rebel without a cause."

That is just one of several great quotes from Russell Kirk (made back in 1957) that are presented by Dr. Brad Birzer, Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and Associate Professor of History at Hillsdale College, in a post on The Imaginative Conservative blog:

The following quotes are all taken from: Kirk, "The Spi'led Praist and the Stickit Minister," The Newman Review (Michaelmas, 1957): 4-8. Apologies for any typos.

"'He that lives in a college, after his mind is sufficiently stocked with learning,' Edmund Burke wrote while he was still a young man, 'is like a man who, having built and rigged a ship, should lock her up in a dry dock.' Now I submit that the principal threat to academic freedom in the United States comes from the dry-docked minds; the minds of ideologues within the walls of the Academy." (4)

"To feel one's self a prophet, but at the same time to insist, 'I am, and none else beside me,' is to indulge a most dangerous mood. A prophet without a gospel is worse than a rebel without a cause." (5) "For the intolerant zealot within the Academy, having denied the existence of a supernatural order and enduring Truth, takes it for his whole duty to turn society upside down. His evangelical zeal is diverted to the demolition of received opinions and things established. He conceives it to be his mission to gnaw at the foundations of society; to convert his students to a detestation of whatever is old and enervated; to elbow out of the Academy all those among his colleagues who will not conform utterly to his own boasted secular 'non-conformity' . . . . He is a bulldozer in a black gown." (5)

"The end of a university or college education is the apprehension of norms. The norm does not mean the average, the median, the mean, the mediocre, although positivistic pedants and ill-informed journalists would have endeavored to corrupt the word 'norm' to that usage. . . . A norm is an enduring standards. It is, if you will, a natural law, which we ignore at our peril. If is a rule of human conduct and a measure of public virtue. It is not, some professors of education to the contrary, merely a measure of average performance within a group. There is law for man, and law for thing; and it is through the apprehension of norms that we come to know the law divinely decreed for man's self-governance." (5) ...

"If a man depends altogether on the private bank and capital of his petty private reason, he is risking his nature at the Devil's chess-game. But if a man fortifies himself within the disciplines of humane learning, he draws upon the wealth and power of the ages, and so is a fit match even for a diabolical adversary." (8)

Read them all: "The Christian Humanist: Neither Stickit Minister nor Sp'iled Praist".