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Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

Book by Ronald Knox · 3 quotes · Faith, Religion, Love

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Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound] Quotes

“What he [Max Plowman] has done is to adopt the Christian maxim, God is Love, to reverse it, quite arbitrarily, into the pagan maxim, Love is God; and then to argue that, because love is an emotion, and consequently to intellectual formula can exhaust its content, there is not need to argue about the existence of God at all. But what has Mr Plowman really proved? Nothing more than that the emotion of love, whether it be love of God or love of a woman or love of a five-pound note, is something unanalysable in terms of atoms and space-time. If he is prepared to deify this instinct, he is welcome to do so, but it is hard to feel the cause of any theology is benefited by the process.”

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Book:Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]
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“What we mean, in the last resort, by 'an answer to prayer', is that from the beginning of time, before he set about the building of the worlds, God foreknew every prayer that human lips would breathe, and took it into account. That, and nothing less, is the staggering claim which we make every time we say the 'Our Father'. If I could have collected all the symposiasts in a room, this is the issue I would have put to them, to 'try their spirits'. By all means (I would have said) let us leave dogma on one side, let us take no notice of all the secular disputes which divide the sympathies of Christian people, let us refrain as far as possible from prying into the mysterious secrets, too high for our ken. But- do you believe that God runs the world, and cares what happens in the world? For, if so, you will have to find something better than a pale, pantheist abstraction to satisfy your notion of God. And if not, you may spare your inkstands; nothing you can tell us about your religion will ever strengthen an infirm purpose or heal a broken heart.”

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Book:Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]
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