Anglicans From The United Kingdom

"The deeper your realisation of the plant in its wonder, the more perfect your union with the world of growth and change, the quicker, the more subtle your response to its countless sugestions; so much more acute will become your craving for Something More."

"For years your treasure has been in the Stock Exchange, or the House of Commons, or the Salon, or the reviews that "really count" (if they still exist), or the drawing-rooms of Mayfair; and thither your heart perpetually tends to stray. Habit has you in its chains. You are not free."

"It is a lonely and arduous excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to dwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there to make of their obvious characteristics a drapery which shall veil the naked truth."

"Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every "mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited: nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way of spiritual silliness."

"Recollection, the art which the practical man is now invited to learn, is in essence no more and no less than the subjection of the attention to the control of the will."

"True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations : quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other."

""Of course I thoroughly agree with you that Christianity was from the first essentially a mystical religion; to me, the doctrine of the New Testament is only intelligible from that standpoint."

"The visionary is a mystic when his vision mediates to him an actuality beyond the reach of the senses. The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond thought to the pure apprehension of truth. The active man is a mystic when he knows his actions to be part of a greater activity."

"As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive powers of your loom."

"It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard work and discipline should be needed for this: that it should demand of you, if not the renunciation of the cloister, at least the virtues of the golf course."

"The helm went down hard and we just cleared the rocks.Otherwise it would have been the end of this poor craft. Our ancient skipper, who was responsible for the error in pilotage, is now wearing what is called his "stuffed monkey expression!""

"Even the power which lurks in every coal scuttle, shines in the electric lamp, pants in the motor-omnibus, declares itself in the ineffable wonders of reproduction and growth, is supersensual."

"Wisdom is the fruit of communion; ignorance the inevitable portion of those who "keep themselves to themselves," and stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they have truly never known."

"It is excellent news that you found that you had really come out strongly and self committingly for Traditional, Institutional Sacramental, Religion."

"Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they represent."

"The Bishop was the Holy Terror of his time; he shows up on the wrong side of every dispute."

"I admired and liked him most before he became a Bishop, and before he leant so much to those High Church views which did harm."

"I do not quite like hearing you, for you make me cry."

"The bench of Bishops has in its time contributed much to the eloquence, as well as to the appearance and dignity of the Upper House. During the last half century its most noted orator was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Winchester, whose eloquence was of a very high order and, like his character, suggested the great ecclesiastical statesman rather than the divine. He leaped into fame by a speech on the Corn Laws in June, 1846, of which his biographer says that it ought to have been heard rather than read."

"A resolution to attend theatres or operas is an absolute disqualification for Holy Orders."

"Is it on your grandmother’s or grandfather’s side that you are descended from an ape?"

"Shabby, word-eating, pocket-picketing, sacrilegious villains."

"Modern liberalism: a heartless steam engine."

"He was the first of the Bishops of the Victorian age to show what the duties of a bishop were. He may truly be said to have recast the whole idea of the Episcopate, and to have successfully raised the tone of clerical life."

"Good Christian People, I have not come here to preach a sermon; I have come here to die."

"If it ever lay in my power, I will work the Cardinal as much displeasure as he has done to me"

"I heard the executioner was very good. And I have a little old creaky neck."

"Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion...The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even--heaven help us--Biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way...with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom. I believe if we face the question, "if not now, then when?" if we are grasped by this vision we may also hear the question, "if not us, then who?" And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?"

"The point of following Jesus isn't simply so that we can be sure of going to a better place than than this after we die. Our future beyond death is enormously important, but the nature of the Christian hope is such that it plays back into the present life. We're called, here and now, to be instruments of God's new creation, the world-put-to-rights which has already been launched by Jesus and of which Jesus's followers are supposed to be not simply beneficiaries but also agents."

"[Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining."

"At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation."

"Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the w:New Testament is much more interested in ...life after life after death..."

"I really hope I can make a difference, even in the smallest way. I am looking forward to helping as much as I can."

"Myself, I wish her well and also wish I could whisper to her: If you really love him, honey, get him out of there, and yourself, too. Many of us don't want or need another sacrificial lamb to water the dried bones and veins of a dessicated system. Do yourself a favor and save what you can: Leave the throne to the awful next incumbent that the hereditary principle has mandated for it."

"I think if you do go out with someone for quite a long time you do get to know each other very, very well. You go through the good times, you go through the bad times, both personally and within a relationship as well."

"I think, the people around home are very supportive to us and those are the people who really matter to us, our close friends and close family and I think if they feel you are doing the right thing you can only be true to yourself and you sort of have to ignore a lot of what's said, obviously take it on board, but you have to be yourself really and that's how I have stuck by it really."

"His appearance and air are dignified, placid, grave, and mild, but cold, and rather distancing. He is extremely well bred, nevertheless, and his half-hour's visit passed off without effort or constraint."

"Mr. Hurd, the supposed author of this performance, is one of those valuable authors who cannot be read without improvement. To a great fund of well-digested reasoning, he adds a clearness of judgment, and a niceness of penetration, capable of taking things from their first principles, and observing their most minute differences. I know few writers more deserving of the great, though prostituted name, of critic; but, like many critics, he is better qualified to instruct, than to execute. His manner appears to me harsh and affected, and his style clouded with obscure metaphors, and needlessly perplexed with expressions exotic, or technical. His excessive praises (not to give them a harsher name) of a certain living critic and divine, disgust the sensible reader, as much as the contempt affected for the same person, by many who are very unqualified to pass a judgment upon him."

"The learned and ingenious Prelate it is well known published at one period of his life Moral and Political Dialogues, with a woefully whiggish cast. Afterwards, his Lordship having thought better, came to see his errour, and republished the work with a more constitutional spirit. Johnson, however, was unwilling to allow him full credit for his political conversion. I remember when his Lordship declined the honour of being Archbishop of Canterbury, Johnson said, "I am glad he did not go to Lambeth; for, after all, I fear he is a Whig in his heart.""

"Toleration should be allowed to those who dissent from an Establishment, & that such Establishment should be guarded by a Test Law. Both these things are provided for in our happy Constitution, & it is not easy to see what should incline wise & good men to think otherwise."

"Of Dr. Hurd, Bishop of Worcester, Johnson said to a friend, "Hurd, Sir, is one of a set of men who account for every thing systematically; for instance, it has been a fashion to wear scarlet breeches; these men would tell you, that according to causes and effects, no other wear could at that time have been chosen." He, however, said of him at another time to the same gentleman, "Hurd, Sir, is a man whose acquaintance is a valuable acquisition.""

"The spirit of Chivalry was a fire which soon spent itself: but that of Romance, which was kindled at it, burnt long, and continued its light and heat even to the politer ages. The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries, such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic Romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in them? Or, may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?"

"In this awfully stupendous manner (at which reason stands aghast, and faith herself is half confounded), was the grace of God to man, at length, manifested: and thus it is, when we come a little to unfold the record, or testimony of the Gospel, that God hath given to us eternal life; and that this life is in his Son."

"Nobody...ought to be punished for religious opinions."

"As to Gibbon, I have read a part of his third volume. Though a writer of sense, parts, and industry, I read him with little pleasure. His loaded and luxuriant style is disgusting to the last degree; and his work is polluted every where by the most immoral as well as irreligious insinuations."

"Mr. Burke's book [Reflections on the Revolution in France] is very entertaining, and, what is better, contains much truth and sound political reflection, though sometimes dressed in a fantastic mode of expression. I hope the innovating humour will decline among us, and that men will be satisfied in being happy after the old way."

"There is an immeasurable distance between submission to the cross and acceptance of it."

"[A good teacher] brings knowledge and his pupil into a vital relationship; and the object of teaching is to establish that relationship on an intelligible basis. This can only be done ... by appealing to two qualities which are at the bottom of all knowledge, curiosity and observation. They are born with us, every child naturally develops them, and it is the duty of the teacher to direct them to proper ends."

"No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good."

"... As for his scepticism, it was of a discriminating kind: it had its limits. It was the scepticism of a man endowed with a strong historic sense, unwilling to dogmatise, who shrank instinctively from defining the undefinable."