Luke Mohan > Recent Status Updates

I want to write other things, and if possible put up some kind of barrage against this revolting age.

There is a sense…in which it can be said that for 350 years Oxford and Cambridge (and Oxford especially) we’re the Church of England; that the secularization of the Universities, an inevitable though long-postponed consequence of the Reformation, was national apostasy.

It is a pity if these [pre-converts] go away with a sense that our prayer-idiom is something much inferior to their own, and that our priests rattle off the service as if conscious that it had no beauty of language to recommend it.

He liked good wine and had the worst.

It would have suited many of the younger dons better to see the Church still represented by a genial and picturesque anachronism than by a sounder scholar and sharper wit than themselves.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.

What St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than the dead, and the dead better than themselves.

talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.

the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm it’s fortress.

I had yet to learn that all human relationships end in pain—it is the price that our imperfection has allowed Satan to exact from us for the privilege of love.

Through all the time when his eager, questing, sceptical mind was exploring and experimenting he remained steadfast in his religious practices and increasingly obsessed by the minutiae of ritual and theology.

He was later rather doubtful of the value of those debates. They trained a man, he thought, to leave the obvious unsaid even to the detriment of truth; to prefer the ingenious and extravagant to the sound argument; to compromise with reason. They removed rhetoric from its true function as the art of persuasion, and made it the art of entertaining conversation.

Ronald had no desire to grow up. Adolescence, for him, was not a process of liberation or of adventure. Manhood threatened him with tedious duties and grace decisions. His mind had flourished and matured while his heart was still a child’s. He grew up slowly. Each stage of his growth imposed a burden; each enlargement of spirit, the loss of something fond.

…conscious for the first time how much my nature craved for human sympathy and support, ai thought it obvious my duty to deny myself that tenderest sympathy and support which a happy marriage would bring. I must have “power to attend to the Lord without impediment.’…It was not in chagrin that he made his drastic resolve; nor did he fear in this innocent adolescent love any threat of adult passion.

The expression ‘doubtless regretted’ seems to exclude any definite expostulation and to confirm the suggestion made above that the Bishop (Ronald’s Father) had not appreciated the force of Ronald’s tendencies or exerted himself fully to deflect them.

“The medieval picture of heaven and hell hasn’t been replaced with anything more realistic, or more loving.” — Who are we to determine what is more realistic? And nothing could be more loving.

“We seek no treasure, “Churchill said, “we seek no territorial gains, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his right to worship his God, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution.

I felt I still loved London deeply. Shorn of her smartness – in wartime attire – I suddenly loved her very much. (Mary Churchill)

Goebbels, meanwhile, fretted about moral decay. In addition to guiding Germany’s propaganda program, he served as minister of popular culture, and saw it as his mission to vanquish forces that threatened to undermine public morality.

“In these days,” he [Churchill] said,” I often think of our Lord.” He could say no more… I [Cowles] have never forgotten those simple words and if he enjoyed waging the war let it be remembered that he understood the anguish of it as well.

Let us vow before God to be better friends and neighbors in the future, because we have suffered this together and have stood here today. - Bishop of Coventry after bombing

There are times when it is equally good to live or to die.

he [Churchill] fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.

There are certain things that a woman can say to a man that a man cannot say.

The speech set a pattern that he would follow throughout the war, offering a sober appraisal of facts, tempered with reason for optimism. “It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,“ he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.“

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, and sweat.”

But one of Churchill’s greatest strengths was perspective, which gave him the ability to place discrete events into boxes, so that bad humor could in a heartbeat turn to mirth.

At no stage in his life did he [Patrick Shaw-Stewart] seek friends; they sought him.