Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  the Christian believer coalesced in him. His meditatio passes with the utmost ease into oratio, and his oratio into meditatio. With profundity he combined an equal clearness and sharpness of thought. He was an extremely skilful and a successful dialectician, inexhaustible in arguments and in answers to the objections of his adversaries. He has enriched Latin literature with a greater store of beautiful, original, and pregnant proverbial sayings, than any classic author, or any other teacher of the church.2162 He had a creative and decisive hand in almost every dogma of the church, completing some, and advancing others. The centre of his system is the free redeeming grace of God in Christ, operating through the actual, historical church. He is evangelical or Pauline in his doctrine of sin and grace, but catholic (that is, old-catholic, not Roman Catholic) in his doctrine of the church. The Pauline element comes forward mainly in the Pelagian controversy, the catholic-churchly in the Donatist; but each is modified by the other. Dr. Baur incorrectly makes freedom the fundamental idea of the Augustinian system (it much better suits the Pelagian), and founds on this view an ingenious, but only half true, comparison between Augustine and Origen. "There is no church teacher of the ancient period," says he,2163 "who, in intellect and in grandeur and consistency of view, can more justly be placed by the side of Origen than Augustine; none who, with all the difference in individuality and in mode of thought, so closely resembles him. How far both towered above their times, is most clearly manifest in the very fact that they alone, of all the theologians of the first six centuries, became the creators of distinct systems, each proceeding from its definite idea, and each completely carried out; and this fact proves also how much the one system has that is analogous to the other. The one system, like the other, is founded upon the idea of freedom; in both there is a specific act, by which the entire development of human life is determined; and in both this is an act which lies far outside of the temporal consciousness of the individual; with this difference alone, that in one system the act belongs to each separate individual himself, and only falls outside of his temporal life and consciousness; in the other, it lies within the sphere of the temporal history of man, but is only the act of one individual. If in the system of Origen nothing gives greater offence than the idea of the pre-existence and fall of souls, which seems to adopt heathen ideas into the Christian faith, there is in the system of Augustine the same overleaping of individual life and consciousness, in order to explain from an act in the past the present sinful condition of man; but the pagan Platonic point of view is exchanged for one taken from the Old Testament ....

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The forests were strictly guarded so as to protect the game, and also, as is probable, to prevent Saxons from taking refuge in their recesses. The foresters and rangers were hated officials. The loss of the eyes and other brutal mutilations were the penalties for encroachment. Towards Richard and John, Hugh showed the same independent spirit as towards Henry. At the council of Oxford, 1197, he dared to refuse consent to Richard’s demands for money, an almost unheard-of thing.1994 The king’s wrath was allayed by a visit the prelate paid him at his castle on the rock of Andely. This was the famous castle built in a single year, of which Philip said, "I would take it if it were iron." To which Richard replied, "I would hold it if it were butter." Upon Hugh’s departure, Richard is reported to have said, "If all prelates were like the bishop of Lincoln, not a prince among us could lift his head against them." Hugh’s enlightened treatment of the Jews has already been referred to. He showed his interest in the lepers, built them a house, cared for them with his own hands, and called them "the flowers of Paradise, and jewels in the crown of heaven." The Third Lateran had ordered separate churches and burial grounds for lepers. His treatment of the tomb of Fair Rosamonde was more in consonance with the canons of that age than agreeable to the spirit of our own. When, on a visit to Gadstow, he found her buried in the convent church, with lamps kept constantly burning over her body, he ordered the body removed, saying that her life was scandalous, and that such treatment would be a lesson to others to lead chaste lives. In his last moments Hugh was laid on a cross of ashes. John, who was holding a council at Lincoln, helped to carry the body to its resting-place. The archbishop of Canterbury and many bishops took part in the burial ceremonies. The Jews shed tears. Hugh was canonized in 1220, and his shrine became a place of pilgrimage. One of the striking stories told of Hugh, the story of the swan, is attested by his chaplain and by Giraldus Cambrensis, who witnessed the swan’s movements. The swan, which had its nest at Stow, one of the bishop’s manors, was savage and unmanageable till Hugh first saw it. The bird at once became docile, and learned to follow the bishop’s voice, eat from his hand, and to put his bill up his sleeve. It seemed to know instinctively when the bishop was coming on a visit, and for several days before would fly up and down the lake flapping its wings. It kept guard over him when he slept. Robert Grosseteste, 1175–1253, had a wider range of influence than Hugh, and was probably the most noteworthy Englishman of his generation.1995 No prelate of his century was so bold in telling the pope his duty.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In addition to the interest which attaches to Scholasticism as a distinct body of intellectual effort, is its importance as the ruling theology in the Roman Catholic Church to this day. Such dogmas as the treatment of heresy, the supremacy of the Church over the State, the immaculate conception, and the seven sacraments, as stated by the Schoolmen, are still binding, or at any rate, they have not been formally renounced. Leo XIII. bore fresh witness to this when, in his encyclical of Aug. 4, 1879, he pronounced the theology of Thomas Aquinas the standard of Catholic orthodoxy, and the safest guide of Christian philosophy in the battle of faith with the scepticism of the nineteenth century. The Scholastic systems, like all the distinctive institutions and movements of the Middle Ages, were on an imposing scale. The industry of their authors cannot fail to excite amazement. Statement follows statement with tedious but consequential necessity and precision until chapter is added to chapter and tome is piled upon tome, and the subject has been looked at in every possible aspect and been exhausted. Duns Scotus produced thirteen folio volumes, and perhaps died when he was only thirty-four. The volumes of Albertus Magnus are still more extensive. These theological systems are justly compared with the institution of the mediaeval papacy, and the creations of Gothic architecture, imposing, massive, and strongly buttressed. The papacy subjected all kingdoms to its divine authority. Architecture made all materials and known mechanical arts tributary to worship. The Schoolmen used all the forces of logic and philosophy to vindicate the orthodox system of theology, but they used much wood and straw in their constructions, as the sounder exegesis and more scriptural theology of the Reformers and these later days have shown. § 96. Sources and Development of Scholasticism. The chief feeders of Scholasticism were the writings of Augustine and Aristotle. The former furnished the matter, the latter the form; the one the dogmatic

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  …” And he began to relate, in a humorous way, his trip down the Yangtze Kiang, with hair falling out and teeth rotting away. In the feeble state that I was in, the yarn that he spun had an extraordinary soothing effect upon me. It took me completely out of myself. He had guts, this guy. Perhaps he put it on a bit thick, for my benefit, but I wasn’t listening to him critically at the moment. I was all ears and eyes. I saw the dirty yellow mouth of the river, the lights going up at Hankow, the sea of yellow faces, the sampans shooting down through the gorges and the rapids flaming with the sulfurous breath of the dragon. What a story! The coolies swarming around the boat each day, dredging for the garbage that was flung overboard, Tom Slattery rising up on his deathbed to take a last look at the lights of Hankow, the beautiful Eurasian who lay in a dark room and filled his veins with poison, the monotony of blue jackets and yellow faces, millions and millions of them hollowed out by famine, ravaged by disease, subsisting on rats and dogs and roots, chewing the grass off the earth, devouring their own children. It was hard to imagine that this man’s body had once been a mass of sores, that he had been shunned like a leper; his voice was so quiet and gentle, it was as though his spirit had been cleansed by all the suffering he had endured. As he reached for his drink his face grew more and more soft and his words actually seemed to caress me. And all the while China hanging over us like Fate itself. A China rotting away, crumbling to dust like a huge dinosaur, yet preserving to the very end the glamor, the enchantment, the mystery, the cruelty of her hoary legends. I could no longer follow his story; my mind had slipped back to a Fourth of July when I bought my first package of firecrackers and with it the long pieces of punk which break so easily, the punk that you blow on to get a good red glow, the punk whose smell sticks to your fingers for days and makes you dream of strange things. The Fourth of July the streets are littered with bright red paper stamped with black and gold figures and everywhere there are tiny firecrackers which have the most curious intestines; packages and packages of them, all strung together by their thin, flat, little gutstrings, the color of human brains. All day long there is the smell of powder and punk and the gold dust from the bright red wrappers sticks to your fingers.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  password three or four times, syllable by syllable, before I looked up and said: Excuse me, sir, but what does it mean? To which Penrith-Smith replied: I think you will find it is a small place in Moravia, site of a famous battle, you know. And sure enough, the Moravian village of Austerlitz was discussed at great length during the next school year, for the curriculum in the Lower Sixth included European history, generally regarded as a complicated and not entirely safe subject, so that as a rule it was confined to the period from 1789 to 1814 which ended with a great English victory. The master who was to teach us this period—both glorious and terrible, as he often emphasized—was one André Hilary, who had only just taken up his post at Stower Grange after being demobbed and who, as it soon turned out, was familiar with every detail of the Napoleonic era. André Hilary had studied at Oriel College, but had grown up surrounded by an enthusiasm for Napoleon going back through several generations of his family. His father, so he once told me, said Austerlitz, had him baptized André in memory of Marshal Masséna, Duke of Rivoli. Hilary could trace the orbit of the Corsican comet, as he put it, across the sky from its very beginning to its extinction in the South Atlantic Ocean, enumerating all the constellations through which it passed, and the events and characters on which it cast light at any point of its ascendancy or decline, speaking without any preparation and just as if he had been there himself. The Emperor’s childhood in Ajaccio, his studies at the military academy of Brienne, the siege of Toulon, the stresses and strains of the Egyptian expedition and his return over a sea full of enemy ships, the crossing of the Great St. Bernard, the battles of Marengo, Jena and Auerstedt, of Eylau and Friedland, of Wagram, Leipzig, and Waterloo— Hilary brought it all vividly to life for us, partly by recounting the course of these events, often passing from plain narrative to dramatic descriptions and then on to a kind of impromptu performance distributed among several different roles, from one to another of which he switched back and forth with astonishing virtuosity, and partly by studying the gambits of Napoleon and his opponents with the cold intelligence of a nonpartisan strategist, surveying the entire landscape of those years from above with an eagle eye, as he once and not without pride remarked. Most of us were deeply impressed by Hilary’s history lessons, not least, said Austerlitz, because very often, probably owing to his suffering from slipped disks, he gave them while lying on his back on the floor, nor did we find this at all comic, for it was at such times that Hilary spoke with particular clarity and authority. His undoubted piéce de résistance was the battle of Austerlitz. He spoke on it at length, describing the terrain, the highway leading east from Briinn to Olmiitz, with the hilly Moravian countryside on its left and the Pratzen heights on its right, the curious cone-shaped mountain which

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The moral hero of the First Crusade is Godfrey of Bouillon, a descendant of Charlemagne in the female line, but he had no definite command. He had fought in the war of emperor Henry IV. against the rebel king, Rudolf of Swabia, whom he slew in the battle of Mölsen, 1080. He had prodigious physical strength. With one blow of his sword he clove asunder a horseman from head to saddle. He was as pious as he was brave, and took the cross for the single purpose of rescuing Jerusalem from the hands of the infidel. He used his prowess and bent his ancestral pride to the general aim. Contemporary historians call him a holy monk in military armor and ducal ornament. His purity and disinterestedness were acknowledged by his rivals. Tancred, his intimate friend, likewise engaged in the enterprise from pure motives. He is the poetic hero of the First Crusade, and nearly approached the standard of "the parfite gentil knyght" of Chaucer. He distinguished himself at Nicaea, Dorylaeum, Antioch, and was one of the first to climb the walls of Jerusalem. He died in Antioch, 1112. His deeds were celebrated by Raoul de Caen and Torquato Tasso.362 The emperor Alexius, who had so urgently solicited the aid of Western Europe, became alarmed when he saw the hosts arriving in his city. They threatened to bring famine into the land and to disturb the order of his realm. He had wished to reap the benefit of the Crusade, but now was alarmed lest he should be overwhelmed by it. His subtle policy and precautions were felt as an insult by the Western chieftains. In diplomacy he was more than their match. They expected fair dealing and they were met by duplicity. He held Hugh of Vermandois in easy custody till he promised him fealty. Even Godfrey and Tancred, the latter after delay, made the same pledge. Godfrey declined to receive the emperor’s presents for fear of receiving poison with his munificence. The Crusaders had their successes. Nicaea was taken June 19, 1097, and the Turks were routed a few weeks later in a disastrous action at Dorylaeum in Phrygia, which turned into a more disastrous flight. But a long year elapsed till they could master Antioch, and still another year came to an end before Jerusalem yielded to their arms. The success of the enterprise was retarded and its glory diminished by the selfish jealousies and alienation of the leaders which culminated in disgraceful conflicts at Antioch. The hardships and privations of the way were terrible, almost beyond description. The Crusaders were forced to eat horse flesh, camels, dogs, and mice, and even worse.363 The sufferings from thirst exceeded, if possible, the sufferings from hunger. To these discouragements was added the manifest treachery of the Greek emperor at the capture of Nicaea.364

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt. Kind, fair, and generous, she has the type of self-confidence that comes from having been brought up by parents who not only loved her deeply and well, but who were themselves kind, fair, and generous people. My grandfather, who died before I was born, was a college professor and physicist by training. By all accounts, he was a witty man, as well as inordinately kind to both his students and colleagues. My grandmother, whom I knew well, was a warm and caring woman who, like Mother, had a deep and genuine interest in people; this, in turn, translated into a tremendous capacity for friendship and a remarkable ability to put people at their ease. People always came first with her, as they did with my mother, and a lack of time or a busy schedule was never an excuse for being thoughtless or unavailable. She was by no means an intellectual; unlike my grandfather, who spent his time reading, and rereading, Shakespeare and Twain, she joined clubs instead. Being both well liked and a natural organizer, she unfailingly was elected president of whatever group in which she became involved. She was disconcertingly conservative in many ways—a Republican, a Daughter of the American Revolution, and very inclined to tea parties, all of which gave my father apoplexy—but she was a gentle yet resolute woman, who wore flowered dresses, buffed her nails, set a perfect table, and smelled always of flowered soaps. She was incapable of being unkind, and she was a wonderful grandmother. My mother—tall, thin, and pretty—was a popular student in both high school and college. Pictures in her photograph albums show an obviously happy young woman, usually surrounded by friends, playing tennis, swimming, fencing, riding horses, caught up in sorority activities, or looking slightly Gibson-girlish with a series of good-looking boyfriends. The photographs capture the extraordinary innocence of a different kind of time and world, but they were a time and a world in which my mother looked very comfortable. There were no foreboding shadows, no pensive or melancholic faces, no questions of internal darkness or instability. Her belief that a certain predictability was something that one ought to be able to count upon must have had its roots in the utter normality of the people and events captured in these pictures, as well as in the preceding generations of her ancestors who were reliable, stable, honorable, and saw things through.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Miller, on the other hand, is no aphrodisiac at all, because religious or so-called moral tension does not exist for him. When one of Miller’s characters lusts, he lusts out loud and then proceeds to the business at hand. Joyce actually prevents himself from experiencing the beauty of sex or lust, while Miller is freed at the outset to deal with the overpowering mysteries and glories of love and copulation. Like other Millerites I claim that Miller is one of the few healthy Americans alive today; further, that the circulation of his books would do more to wipe out the obscenities of Broadway, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue than a full-scale social revolution. Miller has furthered literature for all writers by ignoring the art forms, the novel, the poem, the drama, and by sticking to the autobiographical novel. He says in The Books in My Life (one of the available works), “The autobiographical novel, which Emerson predicted would grow in importance with time, has replaced the great confessions. It is not a mixture of truth and fiction, this genre of literature, but an expansion and deepening of truth. It is more authentic, more veridical, than the diary. It is not the flimsy truth of facts which the authors of these autobiographical novels offer but the truth of emotion, reflection and understanding, truth digested and assimilated. The being revealing himself does so on all levels simultaneously.” Everything Miller has written is part of this great amorphous autobiographical novel and it must be read not entirely but in large chunks to make sense. Many of the individual works are whole in themselves, one dealing with his life in Paris, one with his life as a New Yorker, and there is, in fact, a definite span of years encompassed in the works. But the volumes of essays are also part of the story and there is no way to make a whole out of the parts. Miller is easy to quote if one quotes carefully; the danger is that one can find massive contradictions, unless there is some awareness of the underlying world and the cosmic attitudes of the author. These views are by no means unique, as they are the same as those of all those poets and mystics I referred to in a previous essay. What makes Miller unique is his time and place; he is the only American of our time who has given us a full-scale interpretation of modern America, other than the kind we find in the cultural journals. Incidentally, we do not find Miller in these journals, which, presuming an interest in letters and art, are really organs of social and political opinion. Readers of Whitman recall that Whitman was blistering about the materialism of this country a century ago, and its departure from the ideals of the founding fathers. Miller is worse. Now it is a commonplace of modern poetry that the poet dissociates himself from life as it is lived by the average American today.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Helen took a bite. When she giggled, her teeth washed with chocolate. “Candy yoga,” she pronounced. Anything could be yoga: doing the dishes, grooming the llamas. Making food for Russell. You were supposed to bliss out on it, to settle into whatever the rhythms were going to teach you. Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe. — All the books made it sound like the men forced the girls into it. That wasn’t true, not all the time. Suzanne wielded her Swinger camera like a weapon. Goading men to drop their jeans. To expose their penises, tender and naked in dark nests of hair. The men smiled shyly in the pictures, paled from the guilty flash, all hair and wet animal eyes. “There isn’t any film in the camera,” Suzanne would say, though she had stolen a case of film from the store. The boys pretended to believe her. It was like that with lots of things. I trailed after Suzanne, after all of them. Suzanne letting me draw suns and moons on her naked back with tanning oil while Russell played an idle riff on his guitar, a coy up-and-down fragment. Helen sighing like the lovesick kid she was, Roos joining us with a drifty smile, some teenage boy I didn’t know looking at us all with grateful awe, and no one even had to speak—the silence was knit with so much. — I prepared inwardly for Russell’s advances, but it only happened after a while. Russell giving me a cryptic nod so I knew to follow him. I’d been washing windows with Suzanne in the main house—the floor littered with the crumple of newspaper and vinegar, the transistor radio going; even chores took on the delight of truancy. Suzanne singing along, talking to me with happy, fitful distraction. She looked different, those times we worked together, like she forgot herself and relaxed into the girl she was. It’s strange to remember she was just nineteen. When Russell nodded at me, I looked at her reflexively. For permission or forgiveness, either one. The ease in her face had drained into a brittle mask. Scrubbing the warped window with new concentration. She shrugged

• From The Girls (2016)

  “What’s this?” Russell said. He was wearing one of Mitch’s cast-off shirts, big bloody roses embroidered along the yoke. He was barefoot, wet all over from the rain. “Ask Roos,” Helen chirped. “It’s her kid.” Roos muttered something, her words going wild at the end, but Russell didn’t respond on her level. His voice was calm, seeming to draw a circle around the crying child, the flustered mother. “Relax,” Russell intoned. He wouldn’t let anyone’s upset in, the jitter in the room deflected by his gaze. Even Nico looked wary in Russell’s presence, his tantrum taking on a hollow cast, like he was an understudy for himself. “Little man,” Russell said, “come on up here and talk to me.” Nico glared at his mother, but his eyes were drawn, helpless, to Russell. Nico pushed out his fat bottom lip, calculating. Russell stayed standing in the doorway, not bending down eager and wet toothed like some grown-ups did with kids, and Nico was mostly quiet, settling into a whimper. Darting another look between his mother and Russell before finally scurrying over to Russell and letting himself be picked up. “There’s the little man,” Russell said, Nico’s arms clinging tight around his neck, and I remember how strange it was to see Russell’s face change as he talked to the boy. His features mutable, turning antic and foolish, like a jester’s, though his voice stayed calm. He could do that. Change himself to fit the person, like water taking on the shape of whatever vessel it was poured into. He could be all these things at once: The man who crooked his fingers in me. The man who got everything free. The man who sometimes fucked Suzanne hard and sometimes fucked her gently. The man who whispered to the little boy, his voice grazing his ear. I couldn’t hear what Russell said, but Nico swallowed his crying. His face was thrilled and wet: he seemed happy just to be in someone’s arms. — Helen’s eleven-year-old cousin Caroline ran away from home and stayed for a while. She’d been living in the Haight, but there had been a police crackdown: she’d hitched to the ranch with a cowhide wallet and a ratty

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Anyhow, it’s gratifying to observe how miserable they can look when they are obliged to sit beside a pimp who, despite the little hardships of his profession, lives a life of luxury by comparison. I’m thinking particularly now of one tall, blonde fellow who delivers the Havas messages by bicycle. He is always a little late for his meal, always perspiring profusely and his face covered with grime. He has a fine, awkward way of strolling in, saluting everybody with two fingers and making a beeline for the sink which is just between the toilet and the kitchen. As he wipes his face he gives the edibles a quick inspection; if he sees a nice steak lying on the slab he picks it up and sniffs it, or he will dip the ladle into the big pot and try a mouthful of soup. He’s like a fine bloodhound, his nose to the ground all the time. The preliminaries over, having made peepee and blown his nose vigorously, he walks nonchalantly over to his wench and gives her a big, smacking kiss together with an affectionate pat on the rump. Her, the wench, I’ve never seen look anything but immaculate—even at three a.m., after an evening’s work. She looks exactly as if she had just stepped out of a Turkish bath. It’s a pleasure to look at such healthy brutes, to see such repose, such affection, such appetite as they display. It’s the evening meal I’m speaking of now, the little snack that she takes before entering upon her duties. In a little while she will be obliged to take leave of her big blonde brute, to flop somewhere on the boulevard and sip her digestif . If the job is irksome or wearing or exhaustive, she certainly doesn’t show it. When the big fellow arrives, hungry as a wolf, she puts her arms around him and kisses him hungrily—his eyes, nose, cheeks, hair, the back of his neck… she’d kiss his ass if it could be done publicly. She’s grateful to him, that’s evident. She’s no wage slave. All through the meal she laughs convulsively. You wouldn’t think she had a care in the world. And now and then, by way of affection, she gives him a resounding slap in the face, such a whack as would knock a proofreader spinning. They don’t seem to be aware of anything but themselves and the food that they pack away in shovelsful. Such perfect contentment, such harmony, such mutual understanding, it drives Van Norden crazy to watch them. Especially when she slips her hand in the big fellow’s fly and caresses it, to which he generally responds by grabbing her teat and squeezing it playfully. There is another couple who arrive usually about the same time and they behave just like two married people.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  One of his funniest essays is about the American loaf of bread, the poisonous loaf of cleanliness wrapped in cellophane, the manufacture of which is a heavy industry like steel. Orwell and other critics tend to regard Miller as a kind of hedonist and professional do-nothing. And morally, they tend to regard him as one of that illustrious line of Americans who undermine the foundations of traditional morals. Miller quotes Thoreau’s statement, which might almost be the motto of the cosmic writer: “Most of what my neighbors call good, I am profoundly convinced is evil, and if I repent anything, it is my good conduct that I repent.” One could hardly call Thoreau a criminal, yet he had his run-ins with the law, just as Miller has, and for the same reasons. The strain of anarchism and amorality is growing stronger in American literature, or that branch of it that I am talking about, and Miller is one of its chief carriers. It is not only Emma Goldman, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Whitman, and perhaps Salinger and Mailer, but that whole literature of Detachment from political hysteria and over-organization. I am influenced enough by these people and by Miller to tell my students, the poets at least, to cultivate an ignorance of contemporary political and military events because they do not matter. I tell them not to vote, to join nothing. I try to steer them toward their true leaders and visionaries, men almost unknown in the polite literary world, Reich for instance. Wilhelm Reich furthered a movement in Germany called “Work Democracy”; not machine politics, no politics at all, but democracy within one’s immediate orbit; democracy at home. America is still the only country where social idealism and experimentation have elbow room; there are still communities that practice primitive Christianity, such as the Catholic anarchists; and just plain little homemade gardens of Eden such as Miller’s cliff at Big Sur. The life he describes in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch is a far cry from the little fascist dreams of the New Classicists. And it is a far cry from the bitter isolationism of Robinson Jeffers or even of Lawrence. Morally I regard Miller as a holy man, as most of his adherents do—Gandhi with a penis. Miller says in a little essay on Immorality and Morality: “What is moral and what is immoral? Nobody can ever answer this question satisfactorily. Not because morals ceaselessly evolve, but because the principle on which they depend is factitious. Morality is for slaves, for beings without spirit. And when I say spirit I mean the Holy Spirit.” And he ends this little piece with a quotation from ancient Hindu scripture: Evil does not exist. Whitman, Lawrence, Miller, and even Blake all have the reputation of being sex-obsessed, Miller especially. Whereas Whitman writes “copulation is no more rank to me than death is,” Miller writes hundreds of pages describing in the minutest and clearest detail his exploits in bed.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He makes Servetus a real hero, the peer of Calvin in genius, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, the founder of comparative geography (the forerunner of Ritter), and the pioneer of modern Christology, which, instead of beginning with the pre-existent Logos, rises from the contemplation of the man Jesus to the recognition of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, then as the Son of God, and last as God. But he has overdone the subject, and put some of his own ideas into the brain of Servetus, who, like Calvin, must be studied and judged in the light of the sixteenth, and not of the nineteenth, century. Next to Tollin, Professor Harnack, Neander’s successor in Berlin, has formed a most favorable idea of Servetus. Without entering into an analysis of his views, he thinks that in him "the best of all that came to maturity in the sixteenth century was united, if we except the evangelical Reformation," and thus characterizes him: "Servede ist gleich bedeutend als empirischer Forscher, als kritischer Denker, als speculativer Philosoph und als christlicher Reformer im besten Sinn des Worts. Es ist eine Paradoxie der Geschichte, dass Spanien—das Land, welches von den Ideen der neuen Zeit im 16 Jahrhundert am wenigsten berührt gewesen ist—diesen einzigen Mann hervorgebracht hat." (Dogmengeschichte, Bd. III. 661.) § 137. Calvin and Servetus. We now come to the dark chapter in the history of Calvin which has cast a gloom over his fair name, and exposed him, not unjustly, to the charge of intolerance and persecution, which he shares with his whole age.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He sent them by a private messenger who was introduced to the King by the Duke of Somerset His correspondence with Cranmer has been already alluded to.1244 As a consensus creed of Reformed Churches was found to be impracticable, he encouraged the archbishop to draw up the articles of religion for the Church of England. These articles which appeared first in 1553, and were afterwards reduced from forty-one to thirty-nine under Queen Elizabeth, in 1563, show the influence of the Augsburg Confession in the doctrines of the Trinity, justification and the Church, and the influence of Calvin in the doctrines of the Eucharist, and of predestination, which, however, is stated with wisdom and moderation (Art. XVII.), without reprobation and preterition.1245 During the reign of Queen Mary, many leading Protestants fled to Geneva, and afterwards obtained high positions in the Church under Queen Elizabeth. Among them were the translators of the Geneva version of the Bible, which owes much to Calvin and Beza, and continued to be the most popular English version till the middle of the seventeenth century, when it was superseded by the version of 1611. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth Calvin’s theological influence was supreme, and continued down to the time of Archbishop Laud. His Institutes were translated soon after the appearance of the last edition, and passed through six editions in the life of the translator. They were the textbook in the universities, and had as great an authority as the Sentences of Peter the Lombard, or the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, in the Middle Ages. We have previously quoted the high tributes of the "judicious" Hooker and Bishop Sanderson to Calvin.1246 Heylyn, the admirer and biographer of Archbishop Laud, says that "Calvin’s book of Institutes was for the most part the foundation on which the young divines of those times did build their studies." Hardwick, speaking of the latter part of the Elizabethan period, asserts that "during an interval of nearly thirty years, the more extreme opinions of the school of Calvin, not excluding his theory of irrespective reprobation, were predominant in almost every town and parish."1247 The nine Lambeth Articles of 1595, and the Irish Articles of Archbishop Ussher of 1615, give the strongest symbolical expression to the Calvinistic doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation, but lost their authority under the later Stuarts.1248 Calvin, however, always maintained his commanding position as a commentator among the scholars of the Anglican Church. His influence revived in the evangelical party, and his sense of the absolute dependence on divine grace for comfort and strength found classical expression in some of the best hymns of the English language, notably in Toplady’s "Rock of Ages cleft for me." Calvin and the Church of Scotland. Still greater and more lasting was Calvin’s influence upon Scotland. It extended over discipline and church polity as well as doctrine.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The evil which Calvin and Beza did was buried with their bones; the greater good which they did will live on forever. Dr. Willis, though a decided apologist of Servetus, makes the admission: "Calvin must nevertheless be thought of as the real herald of modern freedom. Holding ignorance to be incompatible with the existence of a people at once religious and free, Calvin had the schoolhouse built beside the Church, and brought education within the reach of all. Nor did he overlook the higher culture."1221

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The writer to the Hebrews has a flash of insight – despising the shame, he says. Jesus was sensitive; never had any individual so sensitive a heart. A cross was a humiliating thing. It was for criminals, for those whom society regarded as the dregs of humanity – and yet he accepted it. The sixteenth-century saint Philip of Neri encourages us ‘to despise the world, to despise ourselves, and to despise the fact that we are despised’ (spernere mundum, spernere te ipsum, spernere te sperni). If Jesus could endure like that, so must we. (6) In the Christian life, we have a presence, the presence of Jesus. He is both the goal of our journey and the companion of our way; at the same time, the one whom we go to meet and the one with whom we travel. The wonder of the Christian life is that we press on surrounded by the saints, oblivious to everything but the glory of the goal and always in the company of the one who has already made the journey and reached the goal, and who waits to welcome us when we reach the end. THE STANDARD OF COMPARISON Hebrews 12:3–4 Consider him who steadfastly endured such opposition at the hands of sinners, and compare your lives with his, so that you may not faint and grow weary in your souls. You have not yet had to resist to the point of blood in your struggle against sin. THE writer to the Hebrews uses two very vivid words when he speaks of fainting and growing weary. They are the words which Aristotle uses of an athlete who flings himself on the ground in a state of collapse after he has surged past the winning post of the race. So, this passage is in effect saying: ‘Don’t give up too soon; don’t collapse until the winning post is passed.’ To urge his readers to that, the writer uses two arguments. (1) For them, the struggle of Christianity has not yet become a mortal struggle. When he speaks of resisting to the point of blood, he uses the very phrase used by the Maccabaean leaders when they called on their troops to fight to the death. When the writer to the Hebrews says that his people have not yet resisted to the point of blood, as James Moffatt puts it, ‘he is not blaming them, he is shaming them’. When they think of what the heroes of the past went through to make their faith possible, surely they cannot drift into lethargy or flinch from conflict. (2) He pleads with them to compare what they have to suffer with what Jesus suffered.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  In this story, as James Moffatt points out, there are five different acts of faith. As with the other great characters whose names are included in this roll of honour of God’s faithful ones, many legends and elaborations had gathered round the name of Moses, and doubtless the writer of this letter had them also in mind. (1) There was the faith of Moses’ parents. The story of their action is told in Exodus 2:1–10. Exodus 1:15–22 tells how the king of Egypt, in his hatred, tried to wipe out the male children of the Israelites by having them killed at birth. Legend tells how Amram and Jochebed, the parents of Moses (Exodus 6:20), were worried by the decree of Pharaoh. As a result, Amram had no contact with his wife, not because he did not love her, but because he wanted to spare her the sorrow of seeing her children killed. For three years they were apart, and then Miriam prophesied: ‘My parents shall have another son, who shall deliver Israel out of the hands of the Egyptians.’ She said to her father: ‘What have you done? You have sent your wife away out of your house, because you could not trust the Lord God that he would protect the child that might be born to you.’ So Amram, shamed into trusting God, took back his wife; and in due course Moses was born. He was so lovely a child that his parents determined to hide him in their house. This they did for three months. Then, according to the legend, the Egyptians struck upon a cruel scheme. The king was determined that hidden children should be sought out and killed. Now, when a child hears another child cry, the first child will cry too. So, Egyptian mothers were sent into the homes of the Israelites with their babies; there they pricked their babies until they cried. This made the hidden children of the Israelites cry, too, and so they were discovered and killed. In view of this, Amram and Jochebed decided to make a little ark and to entrust their child to it on the waters of the Nile. That Moses was born at all was an act of faith; that he was preserved was another. He began by being the child of faith. (2) The second act of faith was Moses’ loyalty to his own people. The story is told in Exodus 2:11–14. Again, the legends help to light up the picture.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The Only True Sacrifice (10:1–10) The Finality of Christ (10:11–18) The Meaning of Christ for Us (10:19–25) The Threat at the Heart of Things (10:26–31) The Danger of Drifting (10:32–9) The Christian Hope (11:1–3) The Faith of the Acceptable Offering (11:4) Walking with God (11:5–6) The Man who Believed in God’s Message (11:7) The Adventure and the Patience of Faith (11:8–10) Believing the Incredible (11:11–12) Strangers and Nomads (11:13–16) The Supreme Sacrifice (11:17–19) The Faith which Defeats Death (11:20–2) Faith and its Secret (11:23–9) The Faith which Defied the Facts (11:30–1) The Heroes of the Faith (11:32–4) The Defiance of Suffering (11:35–40) The Race and the Goal (12:1–2) The Standard of Comparison (12:3–4) The Discipline of God (12:5–11) Duties, Aims and Dangers (12:12–17) The Terror of the Old and the Glory of the New (12:18–24) The Greater Obligation (12:25–9) The Marks of the Christian Life (13:1–6) The Leaders and the Leader (13:7–8) The Wrong and the Right Sacrifice (13:9–16) Obedience and Prayer (13:17–19) A Prayer, a Greeting and a Blessing (13:20–4) SERIES FOREWORD(by Ronnie Barclay)My father always had a great love for the English language and its literature. As a student at the University of Glasgow, he won a prize in the English class – and I have no doubt that he could have become a Professor of English instead of Divinity and Biblical Criticism. In a pre-computer age, he had a mind like a computer that could store vast numbers of quotations, illustrations, anecdotes and allusions; and, more remarkably still, he could retrieve them at will. The editor of this revision has, where necessary, corrected and attributed the vast majority of these quotations with considerable skill and has enhanced our pleasure as we read quotations from Plato to T. S. Eliot. There is another very welcome improvement in the new text. My mother was one of five sisters, and my grandmother was a commanding figure as the Presbyterian minister’s wife in a small village in Ayrshire in Scotland. She ran that small community very efficiently, and I always felt that my father, surrounded by so many women, was more than somewhat overawed by it all! I am sure that this is the reason why his use of English tended to be dominated by the words ‘man’, ‘men’ and so on, with the result that it sounded very male-orientated. Once again, the editor has very skilfully improved my father’s English and made the text much more readable for all of us by amending the often one-sided language.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (3) It is unique in its effectiveness. It produced signs and wonders and deeds of power of many kinds. Someone once congratulated the nineteenth-century preacher Thomas Chalmers after one of his great speeches. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but what did it do?’ As the theologian James Denney used to say, the ultimate object of Christianity is to make bad people good; and the proof of real Christianity is the fact that it can change the lives of individuals. The moral miracles of Christianity are still plain for all to see. THE RECOVERY OF OUR LOST DESTINYHebrews 2:5–9 It was not to angels that he subjected the order of things to come of which we are speaking. Somewhere in Scripture, someone bears this witness to that fact: ‘What is man that you remember him? Or the son of man that you visit him? For a little time, you made him lower than the angels; you crowned him with glory and honour; you set him over the work of your hands; you subjected all things beneath his feet.’ The fact that all things have been subjected to him means that nothing has been left unsubjected to him. But, as things are, we see that all things are not in a state of subjection to him. But we do see him who was for a little while made lower than the angels, Jesus himself, crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of his death, a suffering which came to him in order that, by the grace of God, he might drain the cup of death for every man. IT is by no means an easy task to grasp the meaning of this passage; but, when we do, it is a tremendous thing. The writer begins with a quotation from Psalm 8:4–6. If we are ever to understand this passage correctly, we must understand one thing: the whole reference of Psalm 8 is to human beings. It sings of the glory that God gave to men and women. There is no reference to the Messiah. There is a phrase in the psalm which makes it difficult for us to grasp that. The phrase is literally translated as the son of man. We are so used to hearing that phrase applied to Jesus that we tend always to take it to refer to him. But, in Hebrew, a son of man always means simply a man. We find, for instance, that, in the Revised Standard Version, in the book of the prophet Ezekiel, more than eighty times God addresses Ezekiel as son of man. ‘Son of man, set your face toward Jerusalem’ (Ezekiel 21:2). ‘Son of man, prophesy, and say …’ (Ezekiel 30:2).

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Brothers who are dedicated to God, you who are sharers in heaven’s calling, because of all this you must fix your attention on him whom our creed holds to be the apostle and the high priest of God, I mean Jesus, for he was faithful to him who appointed him, just as Moses was in all his house. For he was deemed worthy of more honour than Moses, in so far as the man who builds and equips the house has more honour than the house itself. For every house is built and equipped by someone; but it is God who builds and equips all things. Moses was faithful in all his house, but his role was the role of a servant, and his purpose was to bear witness to the things which some day would be spoken. But Christ is over his house because he is a Son. We are his house if only we keep strong the confidence and pride of our hope to the end. LET us remember the conviction with which the writer to the Hebrews starts. The basis of his thought is that the supreme revelation of God comes through Jesus Christ and that only through him can individuals have real access to God. He began by proving that Jesus was superior to the prophets; he went on to prove that Jesus was superior to the angels; and now he proceeds to prove that Jesus is superior to Moses. It might at first sight seem that this is an anticlimax. But it was not so for a Jew. For the Jews, Moses held a place which was utterly unique. He was the man with whom God had spoken face to face as with his friend. He was the direct recipient of the Ten Commandments, the very law of God. The greatest thing in all the world for the Jews was the law, and Moses and the law were one and the same thing. In the second century, a Jewish teacher called Rabbi Jose ben Chalafta, commenting on this very passage which declared that Moses was faithful in all his house, said: ‘God calls Moses faithful in all his house, and thereby he ranked him higher than the ministering angels themselves.’ For a Jew, the step that the writer to the Hebrews takes is the logical and inevitable step in the argument. He has proved that Jesus is greater than the angels; now he must prove that he is greater than Moses, who was greater than the angels.