Oh, what a dreadful state, to have our desires one way, and our knowledge and conscience another; to have our life, our breath and food, upon the earth, and our eyes upon Him who died once and now liveth; to look upon Him who once was pierced, yet not to rise with Him and live with Him; to feel that a holy life is our only happiness, yet to have no heart to pursue it; to be certain that the wages of sin is death, yet to practise sin; to confess that the Angels alone are perfectly happy, for they do God's will perfectly, yet to prepare ourselves for nothing else but the company of devils; to acknowledge that Christ is our only hope, yet deliberately to let that hope go! O miserable state! miserable they, if any there are who now hear me, who are thus circumstanced!
--John Henry Cardinal Newman, "Love of Religion, a New Nature", sermon 13, volume 7, Parochial and Plain Sermons, quoted in Jonathan Robinson's Spiritual Combat Revisited, 2003 Ignatius Press.
Posted by billw at April 23, 2003 01:06 PMMetaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
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