"Aim at Heaven..."

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more- food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation as long as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

There are lies, damned lies, then there are fact checkers!

-commenter Greg Mockeridge on this post

...I sat and meditated on the words that John the Baptist said about the One Whom he baptized; "As He grows greater, I must grow less." Therein was the secret of the Christian messsage. As the ego deflates, divinity takes up the abode. Nothing can be occupied by two objects at one and the same time. To decrease is to be less and less occupied with self. That was the day perhaps more than any other that I learned that humility is not something that is directly cultivated; otherwise one becomes proud of his humility. It is a by-product; the more Christ is in the soul, the less the "I" weighs it down. 

-Fulton Sheen, "Treasure in Clay"

And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul- don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

[H/T Nicole DeMille]

 Most universities are no longer temples of knowledge, but of power, and true moderns worship there.

-Dean Koontz, Brother Odd

 [P]ilate evidently caught the idea that moral conduct had something to do with the discovery of truth, so he  resorted to pragmatism and utilitarianism, and sneered the question:

What is truth? 

John 18:38

Then he turned his back on truth- better not on it, but on Him Who is Truth. It remained to be seen that tolerance of truth and error in a stroke of broadmindedness leads to intolerance and persecution; "What is truth?" when sneered, is followed up with the second sneer, "What is justice?" Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right. He who was so tolerant of error as to deny an Absolute Truth was the one who would crucify Truth.

-Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ (1958)

No sinner, ever so odious, but may become a Saint; no Saint, ever so exalted, but has been, or might have been, a sinner.

-St. John Henry Newman, Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (1853)

Epitach on the Politician Himself

EPITAPH ON THE POLITICIAN HIMSELF 

Here richly, with ridiculous display, 

The Politician's corpse was laid away. 

While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged 

I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged. 

Another on the Same 

This, the last ornament among the peers, 

Bribed, bullied, swindled and blackmailed for years: 

But Death's what even Politicians fail 

To bribe or swindle, bully or blackmail. 

On Another Politician 

The Politician, dead and turned to clay, 

Will make a clout to keep the wind away. 

I am not fond of draughts, and yet I doubt 

If I could get myself to touch that clout.  

On Yet Another 

Fame to her darling Shifter glory gives; 

And Shifter is immortal while he lives. 

Epitaph Upon Himself 

Lauda tu Ilarion audacem et splendidum, 

Who was always beginning things and never ended 'em. 

-Hilaire Belloc

Consent no more necessarily makes an action just than consent to a sales pitch necessarily makes the pitch or the product not a scam.

-James Chastek

[H/T Mike Flynn]

Some excerpts from "The Freedom of the Press" by George Orwell (Proposed preface to "Animal Farm", first published in the "Times Literary Supplement" on 15 September 1972)
 _______

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban [...] At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it [...]Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
 __________

 There is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.
 ________

 These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists [...] But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed? [...] To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
 ________

 The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice
 _______

 But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it.

The irony is that plugging one’s ears and screaming “Bigot!” at someone who is trying to present a reasoned argument is, of course, itself a kind of bigotry -- perhaps the worst kind, insofar as someone self-righteously in love with the idea that he is the paradigmatic anti-bigot is the least likely of all bigots to see his prejudices for what they are.

-Edward Feser

From Jeff Miller:

“Too many inveigh against the evils in society because it take their mind off the evil in themselves. They feel better, as if they had done something: just indignation gives the illusion of justice. So with the reprobation of other’s sins, which happen not to be our own. One can work oneself up to a high state of indignation and return to the enjoyment of one’s own sins with a sense of the good fight well fought”.

Frank Sheed - Christ in Eclipse

Before this he quoted Samuel Butler’s lines about people who:

Compound for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to.

A reminder to himself he references.