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If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will--that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings--then we may take it it is worth paying.
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Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson.
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''Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?''
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It was a full moon and, shining on all the snow, it made everything almost as bright as day -- only the shadows were rather confusing.
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When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift?
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Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?
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There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.
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I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say 'at last', I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do - so much have I enjoyed it.
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'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
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If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.
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God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.
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The only thing one can usually change in one's situation is oneself. And yet one can't change that either-only ask Our Lord to do so.
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Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends - comrades - do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed.
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It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.
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But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.
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I wonder if people who asked for God to intervene in our world, really know what they are asking. Will they want to be there when God really does intervene?
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Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
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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?
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And that's why, gentleman, if your little girl doesn't come up to scratch, it will be our painful duty to cut all your throats. Merely in a way of business, as you might say, and no offense, I hope.
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The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question 'What if this present were the world's last night?' is equally relevant.
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We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, 'God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full - there's nowhere for Him to put it.'
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A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.
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Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.
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God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.