Miscellaneous
"'Trends' in the Church are
...serious, especially to those accustomed to find in it a solace and a 'pax' in times of temporal trouble, and not just another
arena of strife and change."--J.R.R. Tolkien
"I find the great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but we must sail, and not drift nor lie at anchor." -Oliver Wendell Holmes
"My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places." ~Winnie-the-Pooh (1926).
"The modern habit of doing
ceremonial things unceremoniously is not proof of humility; rather it proves
the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to
spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual." - C. S.
Lewis' "Preface to
"The natural tendency of tasteless people is to make candles, and everything else they can lay their hands upon, as tall and obtrusive as possible." - Percy Dearmer
"The road must be trod, but
it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon
it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong.
Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small
hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are
elsewhere." - --J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
"We have no doctrine of our
own - we only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church, enshrined
in the Catholic Creeds; and those creeds we hold without addition or
diminution." - --Geoffrey Fisher, 99th Archbishop of
"What great cause would have
been fought and won under the banner, 'I stand for consensus'?" - Margaret
Thatcher
"Devotion is neither private
nor public prayer, but a life given to God. He is the devout man, therefore,
who considers and serves God in everything and who makes all of his life an act
of devotion by doing everything in the Name of God and under such rules as are
conformable to His glory." William Law, "A Serious Call to a Devout
and Holy Life"
During one of Luther's last
celebrations of the Lord's Supper: "The great number of communicants had
wearied his aged arms; at one point his quivering hand caused him to spill a
little of the consecrated wine onm the floor. Luther
put the chalice down on the altar, fell to his knees, and sucked up the wine
with his mouth so that it should not be trodden under foot, whereupon the whole
congregation broke out in sobbing and weeping." [quoted
in Sasse, We Confess the Sacraments, page 134.]
"If I profess with the
loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except
precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment
attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing
Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. To
be steady on all fronts besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at
that point. " -Martin Luther
"It hath been the wisdom of
the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her Publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes,
of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any
variation from it."
"If there were any word of
God beside the Scripture, we could never be certain of God's Word; and if we be
uncertain of God's Word, the devil might bring in among us a new word, a new
doctrine, a new faith, a new church, a new god, yea himself to be a god. If the
Church and the Christian faith did not stay itself upon the Word of God
certain, as upon a sure and strong foundation, no man could know whether he had
a right faith, and whether he were in the true
"We make a living by what we
get, but we make a life by what we give." --Winston Churchill
"Twas
God the word that spake it, He took the bread and
brake it, And what the word did make it, That I
believe and take it." - Elizabeth I, Author: Elizabeth I Source: in