“You do not believe,” said Coleridge, “you only believe that you believe.”
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The spiritual will always body itself forth in the temporal history of men; the spiritual is the beginning of the temporal.
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The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
Every worker in all spheres is a worker not on semblance but on substance.
LUTHER
Perhaps no man of so humble, peaceable a disposition ever filled the world with contention. We cannot but see that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence, in the shade; that it was against his will he ever become a notoriety.
“These words of mine, words of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully as human inability would allow to promote God’s truth on Earth, and save Men’s souls, you, God’s vice-regent on Earth, answer them by the hangman and fire! You will burn me and them for answer to the God’s message they strove to bring you? You are not God’s vice-regent, you are another’s than His, I think! I take your Bull as an emparchmented Lie and burn It. You will do what you see good next; this is what I do”
“I stand on this, since you drive me to it. Standing on this, I a poor monk, am stronger than you all. I stand solitary, friendless, but on God’s Truth; you with your tiaras, triple hats, with your treasuries and armouries, thunders spiritual and temporal, stand on the Devil’s Lie, and are not so strong! ”
DIRT OF WORMS
The world’s pomp and power sits there on this hand, on that stands up for God’s Truth, one man, the poor minor Hans Luther’s son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised him not to go; he would not be advised. A large company of friends rode out to meet him, with still more earnest warnings; he answered, “Were there as many Devils in Worms as there are roof-tiles I would on.”
I have seen and defied innumerable Devils. “Duke George of Leipzig, Duke George is not equal to one Devil – far short of a Devil! If I had business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke Georges for nine days running.”
Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!
We may say the Old never dies till this happen, till all the soul of good that was in it have got itself transfused into the practical New.
It is with all things as with the ebbing of the sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither on the beach; for minutes you cannot tell how it is going; look in half-an-hour where it is! Look in half a century where your caste system goes!
Noble strength, very different from spasmodic violence.
Give a’ thing time, if it can succeed, it is a right thing.
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Alas, is it not too true that many men in the van do always, like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schweidnitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them dry-shod and gain the honour?
JOHN KNOX
Had he been a poor Hulf and half, he could have crouched into the corner like so many others; Scotland had not been delivered; and Knox had been without blame.
Knox, Buddha, Muhammad, Cromwell… commenced their apparent work after 40.
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He is a criminal forsaking his post who holds the world that is in him silent.
Knox felt what a baptism he was called to be baptised withal. He burst into tears.
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“He lies there,” said the Earl of Morton at his grave, “who never feared the face of man.”
TOLERANCE
But on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate! We are here to resist, to control, to vanquish, withal. We do not tolerate Falsehoods, theories, Iniquities, when they fasten on us. Get behind me, Satan, I will take. Smooth Falsehood is not order; it is the general sum total of Disorder. Order is Truth.