Olde Anglican Quote of the Day

The old human analogies cannot be maintained in quite the same naif way as once they were. We cannot go back to the anthropomorphism which found it possible to depict God the Father as a man with a grey beard. Yet we may notice at the very outset that the very incompleteness of all human analogies to God may teach a profoundly spiritual lesson, a lesson which the most religious minds of every age have learned for themselves, but which the wider horizons of modern knowledge enable us to enforce with clearer authority. Humanity and its world must depend in the last resort on some Being other and infinitely higher than themselves. The moment the importance of this truth emerges, we can begin to trace a possible value in the very bewilderment which, as we saw, the growth of scientific knowledge has produced. That growth has made man doubt whether God can be conceived at all in human terms. At least then it is possible that modern thought may ally
itself with old religion to teach mankind a new lesson of humility. If the universe is too great for the categories of merely human thinking to interpret, then we may with the greater reason maintain that the source of it is infinitely more than human, a Being before Whom man does well to abase himself in the dust.

* Essay in orthodoxy - Oliver Chase Quick

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

 If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, ‘If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God.’ The Christian replies, ‘Don’t talk damned nonsense.’ For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.

** Lewis, C. S. - Mere Christianity

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

THE modernity of all modern theology is the characteristic result of the introduction of modern scientific method into religion. And it is a very fair description of that method to say that it consists in a systematic attempt to analyse human experience into facts and beliefs, and to avoid confusion between those two constituent elements of our knowledge. Thus modern Christologies really date from the application of the so-called higher criticism to the New Testament. Herein lies the one essential difference between the Christological problem of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that of the third and fourth. The modern problem starts from the endeavour to distinguish the actual facts connected with the origin of Christianity from the beliefs, theories, opinions and valuations with which from the beginning men's minds have surrounded and overlaid them.

Quick, Oliver Chase (1885-1944). Liberalism, Modernism, and Tradition, Bishop Paddock lectures, 1922.

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

“Reason is an action of the mind; knowledge is a possession of the mind; but faith is an attitude of the person. It means you are prepared to stake yourself on something being so.”

-- Michael Ramsey, 100th Archbishop of Canterbury.

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually means teetotalism. But in the days when the second Cardinal virtue was christened ‘Temperance’, it meant nothing of the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion. Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying."

--- C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"How pitiable is the state of fallen man! Wretched, and yet he will not listen to any proposals of relief; stupidly ignorant, yet too wise to submit to learn anything from God. I have often wondered to see how the merest dunce thinks himself qualified to condemn and ridicule revealed religion."

-- Henry+ Martyn -- Journals and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D.

Olde Anglican Prayer for the Day

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus, who hath sent his angels, and kept me this day from the destruction that walketh at noon, and the arrow that flieth by day; and hath given me his Spirit to restrain me from those evils, to which my own weakness, and my evil habits, and my unquiet enemies, would easily betray me. Blessed and for ever hallowed be thy name for that never ceasing shower of blessing, by which I live, and am content and blessed, and provided for in all necessities, and set forward in my duty and way to heaven. Blessing, honour, glory and power, be unto him that sitteth on the throne, and to the Lamb, for ever and ever. Amen.

--- Bl. Jeremy Taylor

+

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"It is at her centre, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine." - C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity.

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"Any 'religion' which does not take the contradiction of sin and goodness seriously breaks down in 'real life,' because it reduces God to a beautiful mirage, and 'seeking Him' to a hobby instead of the end and purpose of human life. Hobbies can be a pleasant relaxation from 'real life,' but seeking mirages is not worth the trouble."

~ Dom Gregory Dix, 1956, The Claim of Jesus Christ, p 12.

h/t - Father Hollywood

+

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

We are divided at the present day, not because we love schism, but because our forefathers were half barbarous. From the first great separation between East and West to the subdivision of the West at the Reformation, the story is the same. Men acted with the petulance of children, with the unreasoning hate of savages. They made the worst of everything; they hugged their prejudices, glorified their ignorances, made no attempt to understand their opponents, and turned small differences into vital dogmas. There were doubtless saints in plenty at all times; but the saints were seldom public men; and it must be confessed that even the saints were not always untainted by the belligerent atmosphere of society. Christendom as a whole went cheerfully on in an unchristian manner; for Christendom was but partially christianized--less Christian than it is now, and less civilized. The child and the savage quarrel at the least provocation, and quarrel bitterly. Society showed this characteristic because it had not reached maturity and was very far short of the measure of the stature of that manhood which is in Christ.

--- Percy Dearmer

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"We shall with ease convert even the Turks (Mohammedans) to the obedience of our Gospel, if we can agree among ourselves." --- Thomas Cranmer (in a letter to Joachim Vadian)

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"We readily acknowledge, that God alone is to be the rule and measure of our prayers; that in them we are to look wholly unto Him, and act wholly for Him; that we are only to pray in such a manner, for such things, and such ends, as are suitable to His glory."

--- William Law; Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life

+

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"Now, that you may be more sensible of, and thankful to God for, His infinite loving-kindness, and that you may be fully convinced of the necessity and blessing of a Redeemer, you ought to know and consider, that our Saviour and Redeemer came not until man had been tried in all conditions; IN A STATE OF INNOCENCE,--UNDER THE GOVERNMENT OF HIS OWN REASON, and UNDER THE LAW GIVEN BY MOSES. All which methods of Providence, through the perverse will of man, had been rendered ineffectual for the amendment of the world. Notwithstanding which, such was the goodness of God, that He sent, after all, His own beloved Son, to take our nature upon Him, and to assure mankind of the tender love which he had for His poor creatures, which were ruining themselves, without perceiving the danger they were in."


---Thomas Wilson; A Short and Plain Instruction for the Better Understanding of the Lord's Supper

+

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

A poem for the Fourth Sunday in Advent by John Rusher (1790).

O Lord arise, and come with power
Among thy feeble flock,
Be thou our strength, our mighty tower,
And never failing rock;

Beneath the weight of sin we bow,
We falter in our pace,
We find our nature weak and slow
To try the christian race.

Then gracious God renew our powers,
Enable us to run,
And let th’eternal prize be ours,
Thro’ Jesus Christ thy Son.

+

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"While we are calling to mind the mercies enjoyed, it will not be amiss to admonish you of our abuse of some of them,--abuses which, unless reformed, are likely to convert our blessings into curses. Our national sins are pride, self will, and covetousness, and our freedom is misused to an excess of licentiousness. We are, as a people, blessed in the possession of civil and religious liberty. With regard to civil freedom,--I judge from a studious comparison of the polities of different Governments which I made in former days,--no nation possesses a larger measure than these United States. The experiment of a great people binding themselves by a written. constitution in which all that is essential to government is ordered, and all that is valuable in liberty, is secured, has been attempted under the scornful eye and evil wishes of tyrants, and before the earnest gaze of patriots and of friends. It has been executed by three generations of freemen, amidst every variety of vicissitude in war and in peace, in prosperity and distress. Our liberties, accordingly, are restricted and bounded by constitutional laws. Throughout our civil polity are checks and balances, limitations and restraints, that hedge us in and shut us up to certain paths and specific enjoyments. The Law stands above us, and deals out to each citizen his proper measure of liberty, prescribing reciprocal rights and obligations, and thus securing to every citizen of the Republic his due proportion of happiness, and prohibiting all obtrusion upon the privileges of others. The peculiar feature of our government, that which makes it free, is, that it is a government of law, which the people themselves have made for themselves and their children. Their only sovereign, under the great God whom they profess to acknowledge, is the sovereign law. Now, the tendency of our generation and of our age is to disregard the law. The maxim that "the voice of the people is the voice of God," is true only, 1st, when the voice does not contradict God's voice in the Bible, and, 2d, when this voice of the people is lawfully uttered. Assuming that nothing is designed or expressed contrary to the Bible, then the next condition must be fulfilled, before the voice of the people can be urged as authority; it must be duly uttered; uttered from the constituted tribunals of the constitution. Any law is binding upon the conscience until the law be lawfully changed. I may object to the constitution of our State, but I have no right to contravene its provisions, until they are regularly and constitutionally revoked or altered; and if I have no right to take the law into my hands, neither have you neither have the majority, nor even the whole commonwealth promiscuously assembled. The law must be altered lawfully, and in the mode prescribed by the constitution, and until then, it is supreme and sovereign. It were far better to suffer oppression, than to violate this cardinal principle, for it is this which secures our lives, our liberties, and our pursuit of happiness. For the barriers of our will being one by one overthrown, lawlessness will rush in like a flood, and bear us on the roaring waves to ruin."

--- Francis Vinton; A Thanksgiving Sermon (4 December 1845)

†

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"God, in that which is done, respecteth specially the mind and intention of the doer. Cut off then all those things wherein we have regarded our own glory, those things which we do to please men or to satisfy our own liking, those things which we do with any by-respect [that is, with any secondary or ulterior motive], not sincerely and purely for the love of God, and a small score will serve for the number of our righteous deeds. Let the holiest and best thing that we do be considered: we are never better affected unto God than when we pray; yet when we pray how are our affections many times distracted! How little reverence do we show to the grand majesty of that God unto whom we speak! How little remorse of our own miseries! How little taste of the sweet influence of his tender mercy do we feel! Are we not as unwilling many times to begin, and as glad to make an end, as if God in saying "Call upon me" had set us a very burdensome task?"


--- Richard Hooker ; Learned Discourse on Justification - Sanctification


†

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

'God therefore is a law both to Himself, and to all other things besides. To Himself He is a law in all those things, where of our Saviour speaketh, saying "My Father worketh as yet so I." God worketh nothing without cause. All those things which are done by Him have some end for which they are done; and the end for which they are done is a reason of His will to do them. His will had not inclined to create woman, but that He saw it could not be well if she were not created. Non est bonum, "It is not good man should be alone; therefore let Us make a helper for him." That and nothing else is done by God, which to leave undone were not so good.'


--- Richard Hooker ; Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Book I)


†

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"Let one only begin to seek God and he shall find Him. He shall also find that religion brings an increase of strength and joy. It comes to man laden with both these blessings. It brings to him an increase of strength, because he becomes thereby the better master of his nature. All his faculties work more harmoniously with each other and in the true order of their subordination. For each department of our nature to work at its best, the body must be subordinated to the soul, and the soul to the spirit. So does the body work more healthily, the soul more wisely, the spirit with a higher power of usefulness. The religious man becomes a freeman, emancipated from the thraldom of passion, more than owner of himself, a monarch crowned."

---Charles Chapman Grafton; Christian and Catholic

†

Olde Anglican Quote for the Day

"He Who made all things in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, by His Own Power and Will as God, governs them by His Eternal Laws. At best man has but a limited comprehension of those Laws, only such as God has chosen to reveal, as man by Divine permission rightly uses his God-given powers of investigation. Consequently, the Incarnation, instead of being a change or suspension of these Laws, may very properly, for all we know, have been the completion and fulfillment of them, as the Church believes and the Scriptures infer. He Who made the world out of nothing and made man in His Own Image, after His Likeness, He Who rideth upon the wings of the wind and ruleth the raging of the sea, could have found, may we reverently say, no difficulty about the Incarnation. Rather would this act of love (which bridges the gap between earth and heaven, by sending into our very midst God's Divine Son) seem to be the crowning work of the Almighty Father of all good!"

--- Archibald Campbell Knowles; The Holy Christ Child



†