Pooh is male....

"Study Suggests That Winnie the Pooh Isn't Gender Equal."  Pooh is male — but is he masculine?

A comprehensive study of traditional children’s book characters has determined that Pooh Corner may be rife with gender inequality.

Dr. Janice McCabe, a sociologist at Florida State University, examined nearly 6,000 children’s books between 1900 and 2000 and determined the stories have a definitive gender bias and a disproportionate representation of genders.

“We found that males are represented more frequently than females in the titles and the central characters in the book,” McCabe told Fox News Radio.

Fifty seven percent of the children’s stories featured male characters, 31 percent featured female characters and the remainder had animal characters of unknown gender identity, according to the study. .... [more]

Study Suggests That Winnie the Pooh Isn't Gender Equal, But Does it Matter? - FoxNews.com

Prester John

Lars Walker provides an appropriately qualified appreciation of John Buchan's Prester John (1910).

Another Buchan lover (she places him between Tolkien and Chesterton as her "second favorite") notes that "famous John Buchan fans include CS Lewis, HP Lovecraft, Ian Fleming (natch), Mary Stewart, ND Wilson, Alfred Hitchcock, JFK, and Graham Greene."

I've enjoyed all of Buchan's thrillers, including Prester John, but, as Walker writes, "Buchan’s Prester John is a Great Story, Marred by Racial Attitudes":

John Buchan was one of the inventors of the modern thriller novel.... His most famous work is The 39 Steps, adapted out of all recognition by Alfred Hitchcock, but he wrote other excellent novels. I’m particularly fond of the Richard Hannay books.

Prester John is not part of that series. It will never be widely popular again because, fine as it is purely as a story, it strongly promotes attitudes toward race which are (rightly) offensive to the modern mind.

The hero of the book is David Crawfurd (sic)....

The action gets intense, particularly because David is the rashest of young men, consistently running into danger instead of away from it (sometimes straining the reader’s credulity). But Buchan knew the trick of keeping his characters going fast enough to divert the reader from improbabilities in the plot. The climax in a secret mountain cave is fully worthy of H. Rider Haggard.

The problem...is the racial attitudes. .... I’m no booster of the present age as opposed to the 19th Century generally, but on this subject we’re right and they were wrong.

This is the difference between white and black [David says], the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies.

Digressions like that fatally mar what is otherwise a well-written and exciting old-fashioned adventure story. Adults who can discriminate will enjoy it. Children should be kept away from it. (more)

The illustration is from an ex-library copy I have and is probably the one to which Walker refers in his review.

Buchan’s “Prester John” Is a Great Story, Marred by Racial Attitudes | The American Culture

More on the KJV

A friend highly recommends KJB: The Book That Changed the World, a documentary about the historical, and particularly the political, circumstances surrounding the creation of the King James Version. It is narrated by John Rhys-Davies, the actor who played Gimli in the films of Lord of the Rings. In an interview also on the disc Rhys-Davies comments that "It's a special Bible, written at a special time, a time when the language was actually molten, when language could have gone any way... they shaped it thus."

The trailer for the film:

More on the KJV from Thomas S. Kidd, "If It's Not King James, It's Not the Bible":

C.S. Lewis...argued against the notion of the Bible as literature. "I cannot help suspecting . . . that those who read the Bible as literature do not read the Bible," he said.

The Bible is primarily the story of man's sin and God's work of redemption, and no version has put that story in such compelling prose as the KJV. The days of the KJV's dominance are gone, but in the Bible's most famous verses, its cadences reverberate. As John 3:16 says in the King James, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." That still sounds like the Bible to me.

"If It's Not King James, It's Not the Bible"

"A tragic shortage of selfishness"

David Bentley Hart is less than pleased that Atlas Shrugged has appeared on the screen: "I suppose I should have seen it coming. It’s the fashion of the moment. Ayn Rand and her idiotic “Objectivism” are enjoying a—well, I won’t call it a renaissance, so let’s say a recrudescence." He disagrees with Rand's "philosophy" ["For instance, I like the Sermon on the Mount. She regarded its prescriptions as among the vilest ever uttered. I suspect that charity really is the only way to avoid wasting one’s life in a desert of sterile egoism. She regarded Christian morality as a poison that had polluted the will of Western man with its ethos of parasitism and orgiastic self-oblation. And, simply said, I cannot find much common ground with someone who believed that the principal source of human woe over the last twenty centuries has been a tragic shortage of selfishness"], but at least as much he finds her aesthetic lacking ["I know one shouldn’t expect much from a writer who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare"].

Before Atlas Shrugged was The Fountainhead and it, too, was filmed — a major studio film with well-known actors. From Hart's "The Trouble with Ayn Rand":

.... Remember, the chief reason that The Fountainhead is among the most hilariously bad films ever made is that it is so slavishly faithful to the novel and to Rand’s screenplay. .... For most of the movie, the three leads—Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey—seem to be trying to outdo one another in emotional and facial paralysis. Of course, Cooper never could act; but it is positively painful to watch Neal and Massey struggling to achieve some semblance of dramatic plausibility.

The film’s defining moment for me is probably the first meeting between Dominique Francon (Neal) and Howard Roark (Cooper) at the gala opening of a house the latter has designed. “I admire your work, more than anything I’ve ever seen,” Dominique announces without wasting any words on small talk about the weather or the hors d’oeuvres. “You may realize that this is not a tie, but a gulf, between us. . . . I wish I had never seen your building. It’s the things we admire or want that enslave us, and I’m not easy to bring into submission.” (The flirtatious little gamine.) Really, one has to see the scene to appreciate quite how awful it is.

But, then again, there’s also the conversation between the same two characters later that night: “They hate you for the greatness of your achievement,” Dominique tells Roark in a tone that oddly seems to combine erotic agitation with profound catatonia. “They hate you for your integrity. They hate you because they know they can neither corrupt nor ruin you.” (Bloody they—I never could stand those swine.) By the way, in the context of the film this is actually a kind of foreplay. The whole time she’s speaking, Dominique is gazing at Roark longingly, with an inviting come-hither-and-rape-me look in her eyes (which is just what the gallant Roark does a little later on).

Who can say what the most ridiculous moment really is, though? There’s hardly a scene without a rich vein of unintentional comedy. Perhaps it’s Roark’s demented address to the jury at his trial: “The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks. The parasite copies. The creator produces. The parasite loots. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.” And so on.

There, of course, one has the essential oafishness of Rand’s view of reality. For her, the world really was starkly divided between creators and parasites, and the vast majority of humanity belonged to the ranks of the latter. “I came here to say I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life,” Roark continues, “nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine.” .... (more)

"The Trouble with Ayn Rand"

Religion in this republic

David Sehat, the author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom, gives us "Five myths about church and state":

1. The Constitution has always protected religious freedom.
2. The founders’ faith matters.
3. Christian conservatives have only recently taken over politics.
4. America is more secular than it used to be.
5. Liberals are anti-religious.

The reasons he gives for each of those statements being false are explained in the column and I find his explanations convincing in every case except the last — the most recent "liberal" he cites is from 1952. I fear liberal attitudes have moved on a bit since then. In some circles, at least, the desire for freedom from religion — public religious expression, public religious speech— has become the priority.

David Sehat: Five myths about church and state

Easter II: He that hath the Son...

ALMIGHTY FATHER, which hast given Thy only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve Thee in pureness of living and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. [Thomas Cranmer]

WHATSOEVER is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God? This is He that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that bear witness, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one. If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God which He bath testified of his Son. He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. [I John 4]


Though dead, not dead:
Not gone, though fled:
Not lost, though vanished.
In the great gospel and true creed,
He is yet risen indeed:
Christ is yet risen.
[Arthur Hugh Clough]

Not actually about Heaven or Hell

Justin Taylor interviewed N.D. Wilson who is writing a screenplay for a film of C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, one of my favorite Lewis books. From the interview:

Tell us a bit about The Great Divorce. When did Lewis write it and why?

Lewis wrote the book near the end of WWII, and it was serialized by a Christian periodical. The title is Lewis' potshot at William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (Lewis humbly claimed that he wasn't even sure what Blake meant—but he was apparently sure enough to contradict him.)

The book is set in the afterlife, but it isn't about the afterlife. In a series of episodes, we follow the narrator through Hell and onto a bus headed for the outskirts of Heaven.

The stories are fundamentally comedic and zoom in on the pettiness of sin, the narcissism of Hell, and the impossibility of goodness apart from Grace (among other things).

Lewis' genius also comes out in how he upends traditional Christian perspectives on Heaven and Hell—Heaven being radically physical and dangerous (as opposed to ethereal and fuzzy), and Hell is a boringly spiritual place full of soft—but false—comforts (whatever house you want, but it won't keep the rain out). ....

The Great Divorce has been referenced a fair bit lately in the Christian blogosphere, with the suggestion that there are similarities between Lewis's "supposal" and Rob Bell's "proposal." And Bell himself recommends the book in Love Wins. Any thoughts on that?

At times Rob Bell (like in the Love Wins video) sounds exactly like the kind of character that one could expect to find in the pages of The Great Divorce. He seems to enjoy chasing and massaging ideas and questions for the sake of the journey of it all and not for the arrival. Landing on objective concrete answers isn't exactly the goal. That's not meant as a comment on whether or not Bell is regenerate (we're graciously saved by faith not works, luckily enough), but it is a comment on where Bell would sit with Lewis in this whole discussion.

And, of course, Lewis put the universalist George MacDonald in Heaven and made him watch the unrepentant damned get back on the bus to Hell. A little wink and gloat at one of his favorite authors.

As for us, like Lewis, we should laugh at the absurdity of squishy thought wherever we find it. .... (more)

Lewis, from his Preface to The Great Divorce:

...I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course—or I intended it to have—a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world.

An Interview with N.D. Wilson on Screenwriting The Great Divorce – Justin Taylor

"The love which is secure"

From the homily by the Bishop of London, delivered at the royal wedding:

.... As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life. This is to load our partner with too great a burden. We are all incomplete: we all need the love which is secure, rather than oppressive, we need mutual forgiveness, to thrive.

As we move towards our partner in love, following the example of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is quickened within us and can increasingly fill our lives with light. ....

The Royal Wedding Homily by Dr. Richard Chartres, Anglican Bishop of London

"I was glad when they said unto me..."

I am planning to stay up tonight to watch the royal wedding. One reason is my love for history, particularly British history. The pageantry is something nobody does better than that for the British royal family. But another reason is the music:

Processional Music

The Service will begin with a Fanfare by The State Trumpeters of the Household Cavalry to mark the arrival of The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh. The Fanfare will be followed by three Processionals. For the Procession of The Queen, Prince William and Miss Middleton have chosen March from The Birds by Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. Prelude on Rhosymedre by Ralph Vaughan Williams will accompany the Procession of the Clergy, and was chosen for its Welsh echoes. The Couple have selected ‘I was Glad’, also by Parry, for the Procession of the Bride.

Hymns

Prince William and Miss Middleton have chosen three hymns for the Service: ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’, words by William Williams, translated by Peter Williams and others, and music by John Hughes. The second will be ‘Love Divine All Love Excelling’, words by Charles Wesley and music by William Penfro Rowlands. The third will be ‘Jerusalem’, by Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, words by William Blake. All three hymns have been chosen because they are favourites of the Couple.

The Anthem and Motet

The Anthem, ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made’, has been composed specially for the occasion by John Rutter. .... (more)

Music for the Wedding Service

Unfair to our animal companions

I should, perhaps, preface this post with the assurance that I am absolutely against cruelty to animals. From The Telegraph, "Calling animals 'pets' is insulting":

Domestic dogs, cats, hamsters or budgerigars should be rebranded as “companion animals” while owners should be known as “human carers,” they insist.

Even terms such as wildlife are dismissed as insulting to the animals concerned – who should instead be known as “free-living,” the academics including an Oxford professor suggest. ....

In its first editorial, the journal – jointly published by Prof Linzey’s centre and the University of Illinois in the US – condemns the use of terms such as ”critters” and “beasts.” ....

.... “We invite authors to use the words ‘free-living’, ‘free-ranging’ or ‘free-roaming’ rather than ‘wild animals’

“For most, ‘wildness’ is synonymous with uncivilised, unrestrained, barbarous existence.

“There is an obvious prejudgment here that should be avoided.”

.... Phrases such as “sly as a fox, “eat like a pig” or “drunk as a skunk” are all unfair to animals, they claim. [more]

Calling animals 'pets' is insulting, academics claim - Telegraph

"Not in view of...works"

Via Jared Wilson, quoting Luther:

Some of the old saints labored so hard to attain perfection that they lost the capacity to feel anything. When I was a monk I often wished I could see a saint. I pictured him as living in the wilderness, abstaining from meat and drink and living on roots and herbs and cold water. This weird conception of those awesome saints I had gained out of the books of the scholastics and church fathers. But we know now from the Scriptures who the true saints are. Not those who live a single life, or make a fetish of days, meats, clothes, and such things. The true saints are those who believe that they are justified by the death of Christ. Whenever Paul writes to the Christians here and there he calls them the holy children and heirs of God. All who believe in Christ, whether male or female, bond or free, are saints; not in view of their own works, but in view of the merits of God which they appropriate by faith. Their holiness is a gift and not their own personal achievement.

— Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians

The Gospel-Driven Church: The True Saints

"The gravity and splendor...God’s words deserve"

This is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version [KJV] of the Scriptures and I'm learning a lot from the articles published in appreciation of that version. Very few today would argue that it remains the best translation. Better source material has become available since that time and scholarship has advanced. But no Christian should fail to appreciate what it represented in the history of the English-speaking Church, and no one, regardless of faith, should be unaware of what it contributed to the language and the culture.

Barton Swaim, at Touchstone gives us "God's English: The Making & Endurance of the King James Bible, 1611–2011", from which I have taken the following excerpts. The article is much longer and includes much more of interest.

The King James Version of the Bible (KJV) is fast becoming one of the great unread books of Western civilization—remembered and admired but not used. True, there is still a small band of believers in the fundamentalist tradition whose loyalty to the KJV remains uncompromised. But the vast majority of Christians in the English-speaking world think of the King James Bible as a hindrance rather than a help: an interesting document but, in the twenty-first century, pointlessly difficult to understand; an artifact prized by one’s grandparents because it reminded them of another time. ....

For well over three centuries in Britain and North America, the King James Bible was the Bible. Its language permeates our literature. In twenty-first-century Britain, where biblical illiteracy is almost total, phrases from the King James Bible still echo across the cultural landscape—a fact attributable to the nation’s Christian past, but also to the biblical translation that defined that past.

Even so, the Authorized Version, as it used to be called, is now thought of chiefly as an historical novelty. Young people raised in Christian homes today are hardly aware of its existence. ....

One of the great ironies about the King James Bible is that it wasn’t the outcome of godly intentions. The decision to commission a new translation of the Bible was, in fact, part of a cynical political maneuver on the part of the monarch and his allies. ....

Yet however unlovely the circumstances of its provenance, as a translation, the King James Bible was a first-rate work of scholarship. ....

...[T]hey understood, far better than modern translators have, the importance of rhythm in language. This is partly because learned men of the seventeenth century were steeped in written languages—English and Latin, but also Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish—to a degree that even the best educated cannot match now. They understood the dynamics of poetry: Andrewes was himself a brilliant poet, but the others, too, would have been deeply familiar with ancient and modern meters.

Equally important is the fact that the King James translators knew that their renderings would be heard even more than they would be read. The great preponderance of parishioners in early seventeenth-century England were partly or wholly illiterate, and for that reason the translators were careful to make their sentences easy to read aloud. Time and again the KJV’s language falls into a snappy iambic cadence that rolls off the tongue. ....

One of the principal reasons the King James Bible has achieved such astonishing durability is that its diction captures the gravity and splendor one feels God’s words deserve. The Scriptures are old, and the feeling that they should sound old is a natural and proper one. Partly, of course, the KJV sounds old because it is old. But there’s more to it than that. The King James Bible was never what we would call a “modern” translation; even in 1611 it sounded antiquated. The ancient feel of its language was, in fact, largely deliberate.

This was in some measure the consequence of an assumption shared with biblical translators throughout the preceding century: they assumed that the structure of God’s sentences should be given the greatest possible deference. .... [more]

And in The American Spectator Roger Scruton gives us "Translating the Word":

.... How lucky we English-speakers were, that this translation should have been made in the wake of the Elizabethan dramatists, at a time when the English language was at its most muscular and taut, when it could be applied to matters both earthly and heavenly and at once give a fully imagined account of them, gripped in what Gerard Manley Hopkins was to call the "native thew and sinew" of the English tongue. All subsequent translations, set beside this version, are on a downhill path toward banality, and by the time of the New English Bible (completed 1970) it is fair to say that the immediacy and urgency of the King James Bible had been more or less dissolved in watery literal-mindedness.

It is not just the literary merits of the King James Bible that recommend it, however. This was the Bible that the Pilgrim Fathers brought with them across the Atlantic, that the Methodist riders took around the farmsteads and cabins of rural America, the Bible that the merchant adventurers carried to India, Australia, and Africa, the Bible that provided the texts of Handel's oratorios and which inspired the hymns of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. It is the Bible that was planted in the depths of the English-speaking soul during the crucial centuries when the sphere of English-speaking freedom was formed. I doubt that you can understand the motives of the early settlers of America without it. It gave them the names of their towns and villages, the names of their children, the maxims of their daily life and the routines and rituals of their sparse forms of enjoyment. They fought and cursed, made love and sermons, in the language of the King James Bible, and everywhere about us we see the difference that this has made. ....

Touchstone Archives: God's English, The American Spectator : Translating the Word

The Church and politics

During the troubles in Wisconsin last month a Lutheran pastor, Todd A. Peperkorn, offered some wisdom about "How Christians Should Treat One Another in the Midst of Political Turmoil." It is applicable in all such times, and all the time for those of us obsessed with politics. He concluded:

So in summary, this is how I would commend you as fellow Christians to behave in our time of political turmoil:

1. Don’t concern yourself with motivations, secret plots, conspiracies and the like. Human beings will always operate in these ways, and today is no different than a hundred years ago.
2. Do concern yourself with what the issues actually are, and not the personalities involved.
3. Remember that Christians of goodwill can disagree on how love is to be shown to the neighbor. This does not mean someone who disagrees with you isn’t a Christian. It means that they understand things differently that you do.
4. Our unity in faith is immeasurably more important than our unity in politics. If you have found that political agreement is more important to you than who you will be spending eternity with (or where!), then I would suggest your priorities are out of whack and need serious examination. [emphasis added] [more]
   

Thanks to Molle Hemingway at GetReligion for the reference.

How Christians Should Treat One Another in the Midst of Political Turmoil - Lutheran Logomaniac

Of interest

Lots of interesting stuff today:

The Easter bunny and his eggs do not have a pagan origin: "The modern myth of the Easter bunny" by Adrian Bott:

"....The colourful myths of Eostre and her hare companion, who in some versions is a bird transformed into an egg-laying rabbit, aren't historically pagan. They are modern fabrications, cludged together in an unresearched assumption of pagan precedence. ...."

Benedict XVI responds to a seven year old Japanese girl asking why there is suffering. "The Pope answers questions about suffering, persecution, and the Resurrection":

"Why do you have to suffer so much while others live in ease? And we do not have the answers but we know that Jesus suffered as you do, an innocent, and that the true God who is revealed in Jesus is by your side. This seems very important to me, even if we do not have answers, even if we are still sad; God is by your side and you can be certain that this will help you. One day we will even understand why it was so. ...."

Ross Douthat makes "A Case for Hell" in response to the recent controversy begun by Rob Bell:

"....Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

"Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score. ...."

Jared Wilson asserts that

"Every church has a liturgy. Open up your worship program/bulletin. Is the order of worship elements the same each week? That's your liturgy."

and refers us to "How Do You Use Liturgical Elements in Your Church Worship?" at The Gospel Coalition Blog. One of the contributors there, Scotty Smith of Christ Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee responds:

"....Let me be clear: we still want a “free and Spirit led worship culture,” but now we clearly see the place of responsive readings and creeds as a means of helping us offer our Triune God the worship he deserves and in which he delights."

An appeal to Baptists, 1843

In 1843 the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference appealed to the greater Baptist community to consider the validity of observing the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week. The pamphlet that was published, An Address to the Baptist Denomination of the United States on the Observance of the Sabbath from the Seventh-Day Baptist General Conference, is available online as a pdf. From early in the invitation to consider the question:

..... In urging it upon your attention, we think you will not charge us with wishing to raise disturbance in Zion. We indulge the hope that you will impute to us the same disinterestedness of motive by which you yourselves are actuated, when you boldly proclaim your denominational sentiments upon every high place, and scatter your publications in every direction. Your course springs not from any wish to foment disturbance, but from the pain which your hearts feel to see the institutions of Christ made void by the traditions of men. Our action in this matter springs from the same principle. We feel in regard to the Sabbath just as you do with regard to baptism. We declare before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, that we are governed by a desire for your good and God's glory.

When we look over your large and influential denomination, we find, that, in reference to the subject upon which we now address you, you are divided into about three classes. I. Those who, acknowledging the perpetuity of the Sabbath-law, enforce the observance of the Sabbath by the fourth commandment, but change the day of its celebration from the seventh to the first day of the week. II. Those who see the impossibility of proving a change of the day, and, therefore, regard the commandment as abolished by the death of Christ. But, at the same time, they consider the first day of the week as an institution entirely new, to be regulated as to its observance wholly by the New Testament. III. Those who consider neither the Old nor the New Testament to impose any obligation upon them to observe a day of rest, and advocate one merely on the ground of expediency. ....

The authors then proceed to provide arguments against each of these positions — proving that many of the arguments on this subject are perennial. The penultimate paragraph of the pamplet:

Brethren, can we hope that the subject on which we have addressed you, will receive your prayerful attention? Almost your entire denomination has slumbered over it; but may we not hope, that you will now awake? May we not hope, that it will be discussed in your private circles, and in your public assemblies; in your Bible classes, and in your Sunday schools:—that it will be studied by your ministers, and by the people in general; and that every one will, in the deep desire of his soul, pray, "Lord, open thou mine eyes, that I may discern wondrous things out of thy Law." ....

The final paragraph was rather harsh in its judgment on those who declined the invitation—much more so than Seventh Day Baptists would be today—but theological dispute was more unrestained in those days:

But if, on the other hand, we see a disposition to pass it by with cold neglect—an unwillingness to look the question in the face—an attempt, on the part of your teachers and leaders, to hush it up as a matter of no importance—a studied effort to lead the people away  from it, when they are disposed to examine—or teaching them that it is the spirit, rather than the letter of the law that God requires—we shall be constrained to apply the language of him, who spake as never man spake—" EVERY ONE THAT DOETH EVIL HATETH THE LIGHT, NEITHER COMETH TO THE LIGHT, LEST HIS DEEDS SHOULD BE REPROVED."—John III. [the document]

Seventh Day Baptist Address to Baptists in America, 1843

"Gentle, open to reason"

Via Daily Bible Meditations at Educating Christians:

Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. [James 3:13-18, ESV]

The joy of His resurrection

'Tis the spring of souls today; Christ has burst His prison,
And from three days’ sleep in death as a sun hath risen;
All the winter of our sins, long and dark, is flying
From His light, to Whom we give laud and praise undying.

“Alleluia!” now we cry to our King immortal,
Who, triumphant, burst the bars of the tomb’s dark portal;
“Alleluia!” with the Son, God the Father praising,
“Alleluia!” yet again to the Spirit raising.
John of Damascus, 8th Century

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. .... And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. .... And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. .... If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead....
I Corinthians 15 [ESV]

O GOD, who for our redemption didst give Thine only-begotten Son to the death of the Cross, and by His glorious resurrection hast delivered us from the power of our enemy; Grant us so to die daily from sin, that we may evermore live with Him in the joy of His resurrection; through the same Thy Son Christ our Lord. Amen. [BCP]

"Lord, help us"

"The Catechizer" at The Wittenberg Door provides this quotation from St. Augustine, particularly appropriate today as we consider our dependence on God's provision in Christ Jesus:

When you aim at the perfect standard of holiness, you should, at your best moments, and in your highest attainments, fall so far below it; seeing indeed the way before you, but feeling yourself without ability to walk in it? Then let a sense of your helplessness for the work of the Lord lead you to the throne of grace, to pray, and watch, and wait, for the strengthening and refreshing influences of the Spirit of grace. Here let your faith realize at one and the same view your utter insufficiency, and His complete All-sufficiency....We might as soon create a world, as create in our hearts one pulse of spiritual life. And yet our inability does not cancel our obligation. What then remains for us, but to return the mandate to heaven, accompanied with an earnest prayer, that the Lord would write upon our hearts those statutes, to which He requires obedience in His word?, "You have commanded us to keep Your statutes diligently." We acknowledge, Lord, our obligation; but we feel our impotency. Lord, help us: we look unto You. "Oh that our ways were directed to keep Your statutes!" "Give what You command—and then command what You will."

The Wittenberg Door: Notable Quote: Augustine

Wondrous love

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul.

Alexander Means, c. 1830

GRANT, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of Thy blessed Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with Him; and that through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection; for His merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, the same Thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. [BCP]

"The sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal"

Good films have been made of bad books and bad ones of good books. Whether Atlas Shrugged is one of the former I do not know. But I do regret the added attention that will be given the author's "philosophy." Today, Michael Gerson on Ayn Rand's "Adult-Onset Adolescence":

.... Rand's novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible. "The Objectivist ethics, in essence," said Rand, "hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself."

If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship. Usually one grows out of it, eventually discovering that the quality of our lives is tied to the benefit of others. Rand's achievement was to turn a phase into a philosophy, as attractive as an outbreak of acne. ....

Rand cherished a particular disdain for Christianity. The cross, she said, is "the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal. ... It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture." Yet some conservatives marked Holy Week by attending and embracing Atlas Shrugged. ....

Conservatives have been generally suspicious of all ideologies, preferring long practice and moral tradition to utopian schemes of left or right. And Rand is nothing if not utopian. In Atlas Shrugged, she refers to her libertarian valley of the blessed as Atlantis.

It is an attractive place, which does not exist, and those who seek it drown. (more)

Ayn Rand's Adult-Onset Adolescence - Michael Gerson - Townhall Conservative