Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > Orthodoxy > Status Update

"Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point - and does not break" (144-5).

"You will hear...that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is...the rich man...has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually...politically...financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ...said...that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck" (122-3).

"As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind" (111).

"It is constantly assured...that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation & imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem...Can the lion lie down with the lamb & still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved" (100).

"I had been blundering about...with two huge...machines-the world & the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world: one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it...I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike...that God was personal, & had made a world separate from Himself. The spike...fitted exactly into the hole in the world..." (79).

"...the materialist...is in...the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large...It was like telling a prisoner in Reading goal that the goal now covered half the country. The warder would have noting to show the man except more...long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights & empty of all that is human" (60).

"It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception" (49-50).