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Pascal says that God ‘instituted prayer in order to allow His creatures the dignity of causality’.
The two methods by which we are allowed to produce events may be called work and prayer.
laborare est orare (work is prayer)
The kind of causality we exercise by work is, so to speak, divinely guaranteed, and therefore ruthless. By it we are free to do ourselves as much harm as we please. But the kind which we exercise by prayer is not like that; God has left Himself a discretionary power. Had He not done so, prayer would be an activity too dangerous for man and we should have the horrible state of things envisaged by Juvenal: ‘Enormous prayers which Heaven in anger grants.’2
‘Such and such things you may do according to the fixed rules of this school. But such and such other things are too dangerous to be left to general rules. If you want to do them you must come and make a request and talk over the whole matter with me in my study. And then—we’ll see.’
One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.
foolish preachers, by always telling you how much Christianity will help you and how good it is for society, have actually led you to forget that Christianity is not a patent medicine. Christianity claims to give an account of facts—to tell you what the real universe is like.
To the Materialist things like nations, classes, civilizations must be more important than individuals, because the individuals live only seventy odd years each and the group may last for centuries. But to the Christian, individuals are more important, for they live eternally; and races, civilizations and the like, are in comparison the creatures of a day.
he is really asking to be allowed to get on with being ‘good’ before he has done his best to discover what good means.
He has lost his intellectual virginity.
Lovely turn of phrase. I like!
intellectual honour has sunk very low in our age—I
Faced with such an issue, can you really remain wholly absorbed in your own blessed ‘moral development’?
Mere morality is not the end of life. You were made for something quite different from that.
(Socrates was much nearer the reality)
Socrates was AMAZINGLY close, on a natural level.
Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. We are to be re-made.
The idea of reaching ‘a good life’ without Christ is based on a double error. Firstly, we cannot do it; and secondly, in setting up ‘a good life’ as our final goal, we have missed the very point of our existence.
Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are ‘done away’ and the rest is a matter of flying.
This entire paragraph is such a beautiful piece of prose. Wow.
If the younger generation have never been told what the Christians say and never heard any arguments in defence of it, then their agnosticism or indifference is fully explained.
There is nothing in the nature of the younger generation which incapacitates them for receiving Christianity.
the sources of unbelief among young people today do not lie in those young people.
Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.
A society which is predominantly Christian will propagate Christianity through its schools: one which is not, will not. All the ministries of education in the world cannot alter this law. We have, in the long run, little either to hope or fear from government.
Let the abstract scheme of education be what it will: its actual operation will be what the men make it.
Where the tide flows towards increasing State control, Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in the other way ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always in fact (though not for a long time yet in words) be treated as an enemy.
If you make the adults of today Christian, the children of tomorrow will receive a Christian education.
Those who worship the Life-Force do not do much about transmitting it: those whose hopes are all based on the terrestrial future do not entrust much to it.
there is on each of us a load which, if nothing is done about it, will in fact break us, will send us from this world to whatever happens afterwards, not as souls but as broken souls.
No man has any natural knowledge of his own inner state
Again and again His plans too have been shipwrecked by that fatal flaw in people’s character.
Aka the sin nature.
under the influence of nagging jealousy, or possessive selfishness, their character is day by day ceasing to be human.
I think that this steady facing of what one does know and bringing it before God, without excuses, and seriously asking for Forgiveness and Grace, and resolving as far as in one lies to do better, is the only way in which we can ever begin to know the fatal thing which is always there, and preventing us from becoming perfectly just to our wife or husband, or being a better employer or employee.
Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others. It is healthier to think of one’s own.
Socrates had exhorted men to ‘follow the argument wherever it led them’:
In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.
Christianity is not merely what a man does with his solitude. It is not even what God does with His solitude. It tells of God descending into the coarse publicity of history and there enacting what can—and must—be talked about.
In Buddhism, on the other hand, we find that a doctrine of immortality is central, while there is nothing specifically religious.
I cannot help thinking that any religion which begins with a thirst for immortality is damned, as a religion, from the outset.
the essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends;
the supernatural, both diabolical and divine.
What is the use of saying that all events are subject to laws if you also say that every event which befalls the individual unit of matter is not subject to laws.
This point of scientific method merely shows (what no one to my knowledge ever denied) that if miracles did occur, science, as science, could not prove, or disprove, their occurrence.
What cannot be trusted to recur is not material for science: that is why history is not one of the sciences.
We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like innumerable other questions, excludes laboratory treatment.
historians who beg the question by beginning with materialistic assumptions)
By thinking at all we have claimed that our thoughts are more than mere natural events.
The religious mind as such, like the older sort of scientific mind as such, does not care a rap about socially useful propositions. Both are athirst for reality, for the utterly objective, for that which is what it is.
efforts to eliminate what is our own in order that the Other may speak.
It is not costly enough.
If there is no God then we have no interest in the minimal religion or any other.
Hence, in all true Christian asceticism, that respect for the thing rejected which, I think, we never find in pagan asceticism. Marriage is good, though not for me; wine is good, though I must not drink it; feasts are good, though today we fast.
