Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.
Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.
Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.
The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development--
God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.
To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek Calends.
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'
As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
When humans should have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.
The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.
If He who in Himself can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.
