Stephen Cranney

“But science, dominated by the spirit of religion is the key to progress and the hope of the future. For example, evolution's beautiful theory of the creation of the world offers many perplexing problems to the inquiring mind. Inevitably, a teacher who denies divine agency in creation, who insists there is no intelligent purpose in it, will infest the student with the thought that all may be chance. I say, that no youth should be so led without a counter balancing though. Even the skeptic teacher should be fair enough to see that even Charles Darwin, when he faced this great question of annihilation, that the creation is dominated only by chance wrote: "It is an intolerable thought than man and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long, continued slow progress." And another good authority, Raymond West, said, "Why this vast [expenditure] of time and pain and blood?" Why should man come so far if he's destined to go no farther? A creature that travels such distances and fought such battles and won such victories deserves what we are compelled to say, "To conquer death and rob the grave of its victory.”
― David O McKay

“At night as he lay in bed with his eyes closed listening to the song of the turtledove in the trees, behind his closed eyelids he would pass through every scene in the life of Christ. From childhood the face of Christ had been for him the fulfillment of his every dream and ideal. The face of Christ as he preached to the crowd the Sermon on the Mount. The face of Christ as he passed over the Lake of Galilee at dusk. Even in its moments of terrble torture this face had never lost its beauty. Those soft, clear eyes which pierced to the very core of a man's being were now fixed upon him. The face that could do no wrong, utter no word of insult. When the vision of this face came before him, fear and trembling seemed to vanquish like the tiny ripples that are quietly sucked up by the sand of the seashore.”
― Shūsaku Endō, Silence

“I should like my epitaph to say, "He helped people see God in the ordinary things of life, and he made children laugh.”
― Revd Awdry

“The popular notion that man, once escaped from the confinement of the body, does nothing except sit...rests upon no evidence, whether of reason or revelation....Why should we not work forever as well as now? If man can live again, and grow in that new life, and exert himself to carry out the always hidden, but necessarily magnificent purpose of the Creator, then indeed, his existence may have some importance, and the insignificance of his place of origin be forgotten. For he has an inherent quality which does not belong, so far as the mind can see what must always remain partially dark, even the Divine; he is capable of effort, and in the effort and through the effort, not only of growing greater than before, but of adding force to an inanimate thing like his own body. What if that power of effort should be slowly aggrandized until man, now a little higher than the monkey, became a really great being?”
― Robert Ball