Peter

“No heroine in Charlotte and Anne Bronte's fiction omits this duty, even in times of danger and perturbation of mind; but most of them also live through moments when the greatest mercy they can hope for is to be saved from utter despair. Jane Eyre in the coach on her flight from Thornfield, Caroline Helstone in the valley of the shadow, Lucy Snowe isolated with the 'cretin' in the Rue Fossette, Agnes Grey pining for Mr Weston, and Helen Huntingdon brutally ill-treated and humiliated - all of them turn to God for help in their efforts not to sink altogether under the burden of their distress. Not the least of the troubles is their awareness of the sinfulness of giving up hope. Authors of religious manuals repeatedly warned their readers not to 'yield for a moment to Satan's temptations to despair. If you do not strive, you know you must be lost.' No wonder human endeavours were felt to be unequal to the task of vanquishing the combination of acute suffering and the threat of spiritual ruin if one were to allow oneself to be crushed by it.”
― Marianne Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion

“Pere Silas in Villette marshals his forces with considerable skill and subtlety. Although he claims to be momentarily taken aback by the young woman to whom his customary set of routine responses does not apply, he soon divines her weak spots and engineers his temptations accordingly. Lucy's passionate nature, frustrated and mortified in her loneliness and desperate for kindness and affection, is one of his three targets. Another is her aesthetic sensibilities, which he hope to impress by way of the splendours of Roman Catholic worship. Finally, she has an extraordinarily active intellect allied to an ascetic, somewhat morbid streak and a conspicuous absence of any talent for contentment. Such people rarely attain serenity in life by their own efforts, and Pere Silas holds a key to that state: soothed by a carefully prescribed routine of good works, just arduous enough to keep her strictly occupied without exhausting her, her searching, irritable mind will surely find peace.”
― Marianne Thormahlen, The Brontës and Religion

“The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, The Complete Poems