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97                                                            " ... the secret of living is the same as the secret of joy; both revolve around Christ. Don't try to pursue happiness, just cultivate a Christ-centred, Christ-controlled life, and you'll have more happiness than you know what to do with!" - Bob & Debby Gass with Ruth Gass Halliday, The Word For Today, entry for 11 July 2008.

96                                                            “Does [N. T. ]Wright [Bishop of Durham] really believe that with women bishops on the way, that England’s moribund parishes will miraculously fill up on Sunday morning with torpid English men and women, filled with coffee, emerging out of the fog to fill near empty pews to hear the Rt. Rev. Eleanor Snodgrass, formerly just the Rev. Snodgrass drone on about the environment, and during the passing of the peace, insist that all the old age pensioners grab their canes go outside and hug a tree? … Rowan Williams and his Instruments of Unity are presiding over a dying body, who many believe is no longer the Body of Christ, but something altogether different” – David Virtue, Virtueonline, 8 July 2008:  http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8571

95                                                            "When God wishes to be the whole life of souls ... all individual ideas, understanding, endeavours, searching, or argument become a source of fantasy. And when, after several experiences of the folly of their own efforts, they finally recognize their futility, they discover that God has blocked every other avenue in order that they should walk with him alone." - Jean-Pierre de Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment (trans. K. Muggerdige), Fount, 1981, p. 32-3.

94                                                            "The paradox of hedonism [is] the simple, yet stultifying, fact that pleasure cannot satisfy ...  Pleasure, beauty, personal relationships: all seem to promise so much, and yet when we grasp them, we find that what we were seeking was not located in them, but lies beyond them." - Alister McGrath, Understanding Doctrine. Its Purpose and Relevance for Today, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, p. 46.

93                                                            "It is thought grand and wise to condemn no opinion whatsoever, and to pronounce all earnest and clever teachers to be trustworthy, however heterogeneous and mutually destructive their opinions may be. - Everything forsooth is true, and nothing is false!" - J. C. Ryle, Holiness (1877), edition produced by James Clark, London, 1956, p. 11

92                                                             “ … while infanticide was commonly accepted in ancient times, only the Jews and the Christians actively opposed it. The strength of their opposition paid off when infanticide was outlawed by Emperor Valentinian, a Christian, in the 4th century. So, as Western culture abandons its Christian roots, we ought not to be surprised that infanticide is making a comeback". - from Bishop Tom Wright’s sermon The Uncomfortable Truth of Easter  (Easter Day 2008), as reported by Anglican Mainstream,  http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/index.php/2008/03/25/abortion-and-euthanasia-dutch-developments/#more-3024

91                                                            "What a burden the New Atheists carry! ... To learn nothing about human nature from anyone who wrote before 1859. To despise saints. ... One reason I am a Christian is that following Jesus doesn't force me to leave the rest of the human race (and its full experience) behind. Christ allows me to become an intellectually fulfilled humanist." - David Marshall, The Truth Behind the New Atheism, Harvest House Publishers, 2007, p. 200.

90                                                            "One of the most frightening things about following Jesus is his requirement that we abandon responsibility for deciding how we will help him." - Adrian Plass, The Unlocking. God's Escape Plan for Frightened People, Bible Reading Fellowship, 1994, etc., p. 82.

89                                                            "The fact that people have a lot of virtues ... doesn't prove anything about the goodness of their actions. You can have all the virtues - that's to say, all except the two that really matter, understanding and compassion - you can have all the others, I say, and be a thoroughly bad man. Indeed, you can't be really bad unless you do have most of the virtues. Look at Milton's Satan for example. Brave, strong, generous, loyal, prudent, temperate, self-sacrificing. And let's give the [1930s] dictators the credit that's due to them; some of them are nearly as virtuous as Satan. Not quite, I admit, but nearly. That's why they can achieve so much evil." - Bill Propter, in Aldous Huxley's novel After Many A Summer (1939), Grafton edition, 1976, etc., p. 97.

88                                                            "Nature is what we were put in this world to rise above" - Rose Sanger, Katharine Hepburn's character in the film The African Queen (1951).

87                                                            "I do not always get what I want [in prayer], but I do not want a God who always agrees with me: I want some mystery and unknowing and unpredictability. To wish otherwise is to want God to become one of us. That will not do" - Roger Haycraft, Swallowing Christianity Whole, The Maypole Press, 2006, p. 5.

86                                                            "Sigmund Freud ...was quick to argue that believing in God was an illusion grounded in human longing for consolation. Even so, he had little time for the disturbing thought that atheism might be equally illusory, grounded in the human longing for autonomy. One of the driving impulses that brought the modern world into existence was the human desire to be free - free to make our own choices, choose our own destinies and not be accountable to any higher authority for our own decisions" - Alister McGrath, Resurrection, London, SPCK, 2007, p. 30.

85                                                            “Evolution supposedly explains the reason for our existence. The "free-thinking" evolutionists believe that we are simply the result of a cosmic collision of biochemistry and chance. This scientifically-invalid position is alluring to those who reject existence of God because it means that there is no objective, moral truth. To the evolutionist, values are as fluid as one's emotions and animal urges. Since they claim that we are just advanced apes derived from a common ancestor, this simply helps increase the speed at which our society slips into decline.”  - Tom Sutcliff, Why Evolution is a Fraud. A Secular and Common-Sense Deconstruction, Red State Publishing, 2007, p. 1.

84                                                            “If God is love, he must utterly reject, and ultimately deal with, all that pollutes, distorts and destroys his world and his image-bearing creatures.   …    In his magisterial Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), [Miroslav Volf] demonstrates … that it simply won't do, when faced with radical evil, to say, 'Oh well, don't worry, I will love you and forgive you anyway.' That (as the [Church of England] 1938 Doctrine Report already saw) is not forgiveness; it is belittling the evil that has been done. Genuine forgiveness must first 'exclude', argues Volf, before it can 'embrace'; it must name and shame the evil, and find an appropriate way of dealing with it, before reconciliation can happen. Otherwise we are just papering over the cracks. As I said early on, if God does not hate the wickedness that happens in his beautiful world, he is neither a good nor a just God, and chaos is come again.” - Tom Wright, in his essay “The Cross and the Caricatures. A response to Robert Jenson, Jeffrey John, and a new volume entitled Pierced for Our Transgressions”, 2007, Fulcrum http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2007/20070423wright.cfm?doc=205

83                                                           “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity” –  not Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman etc., but Adolf Hitler, in a speech of 1941, according to Richard Swancy Woodling, “God, the Universe and Darwin. The Jury Speaks”, an article on the internet at: http://www.reachouttrust.org/articles/evolution/articlepdf.pdf

82                                                        "It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. ... Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention." - Malcolm Muggeridge on failure, in a collection of his radio presentations, Muggeridge Through the Microphone, London, Collins Fontana, 1969, p. 75.

81                                                        "Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some another. ... For man, made in God's image, to turn aside from this universal love, and fashion his own judgements based on his own fears and disparities, is a fearful thing, bound to have fearful consequences." - Malcolm Muggeridge in his book concerned with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Something Beautiful for God, London, Fontana, 1972, p. 29-30. 

80                                                        "Before going to China, I met with one of the missionaries who had been expelled in 1950. 'We felt so sorry for the church we left behind', he said. 'They had no one to teach them, no printing presses, no seminaries, no one to run their clinics and orphanages. No resources, really, except the Holy Spirit.' It appears the Holy Spirit did just fine." - Philip Yancey on the phenomenal growth of Christianity in modern China, Finding God in Unexpected Places, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2002, p. 186.

79                                                        "I learned from experience that joy does not reside in the things about us, but in the very depths of the soul, that one can have it in the gloom of a dungeon as well as in the palace of a king." - Thérèse of Lisieux, in her autobiography The Story of a Soul, Rockford, Illinois, Tan Books, 1997, p. 99.

78                                                      "It is more than curious that Britain and Russia ... have halted the death penalty for the guilty, but do nothing to restrict incredibly high abortion rates that kill the innocent. This reflects an inverted value system."  - Cal Thomas, writing about the execution of Saddam Hussein in the Jewish World Review (US), 3 January 2007 (internet).

77                                                      "When I say I despised it [the Church of England, which she left to join the Roman Catholic Church], I do not mean the thousands of very conscientious clergy who teach the faith. What I am talking about was the eternal tendency of the hierarchy all the time to sacrifice faith to fashion, creed to compromise. I think the debate on the ordination of women typified that. It was not about theology, it wasn’t about ‘Is it possible for a woman to be part of the apostolic succession?’, it wasn’t about headship. The leader of the Church of England actually said, ‘If we don’t do this, we shan’t be acceptable to the secular world.’" - Anne Widdecome, interviewed for Third Way [see 76].

76                                                     "Young people are drawn into cults whose rules are eight times as strict as any mainstream church would ever dare to inflict and they’re drawn in because they’re looking for two things: the supernatural and a set of rules. Why is the church falling down? Because it’s afraid on both scores." - Anne Widdecombe, "Anything but a Quaker", interviewed by Roy McCloughry for Third Way, 20 July 1998, http://www.thirdway.org.uk/past/index.htm

75                                                   " … it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no purpose to life or the universe, indeed whose only moral drive seems to be sneering at their fellow human beings who do have a sense of purpose. Here is where the biological expertise of Dawkins and his friends could prove illuminating. Maybe they can turn their Darwinian lens on themselves and help us understand how atheism, like the human tailbone and the panda's thumb, somehow survived as an evolutionary leftover of our primitive past." - Dinesh D'Souza, "God knows why faith is thriving", San Francisco Chronicle, 22 October 2006.

74                                                           Dan Rather (CBS television interviewer) to Mother Teresa of Calcutta: "When you pray, what do you say to God?" Teresa: "I don't say anything, I listen". Rather: "Well okay … when God speaks to you, then, what does he say?" Teresa: "He doesn't say anything. He listens. ... And if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you" (recounted by Bob & Debby Gass, in The Word For Today, Winter 2006/7 (entry for Friday 3 November 2006)).

73                                            "Church should be a haven for people who feel terrible about themselves - theologically, that is our ticket for entry. God needs humble people (which usually means humbled people) to accomplish his work." - Philip Yancey, What's so Amazing About Grace?, Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1997, p. 274.

72                                            "'We must preserve Hertham [this earth/world as it is] not only because it is beautiful but also because it is our home, our true home, the only home we can be sure of."' - sceptic Professor Simpkins in Harry Blamires's fable New Town, Grand Rapids, Revell, 2005, p. 65; see Readers Guide to New Town, and associated sites.

71                                            "'Worry ... is nothing more than prayer to the devil. You have a Savior, and your Savior has made it clear what you are to do when your heart is troubled'" - great-aunt Eulesta's words, recalled in Tom Morrisey's novel Dark Fathom, Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2005, p. 114 and also "Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength. It does not enable us to escape evil. It makes us unfit to face evil when it comes. It is the interest you pay on trouble before it comes" - Corrie ten Boom, as quoted on the ReJesus site.

70                                            "It is our vocation at this dark period in the life of our church [the Church of England] to keep the land tilled, quietly preserving the faith, upholding Scripture, teaching the people of God, waiting and praying for the day when under God the darkness of this present world ... is dispelled once again by the overwhelming light of Christ. / In the meantime, God does not call us to be successful, for that is never the Christian's vocation. Rather we are to be faithful - nothing more, nothing less - however dark the way, however painful, however impossible the future may appear." - George Austin, A Journey to Faith, London, Triangle (SPCK), 1992, p. 158.

69                                            “Depending on the Gnostic gospels for authentic historical information about Jesus is like learning aerodynamics by watching Snoopy fly his doghouse. But the facts won’t dissuade those eager to drain Christianity of its moral authority. For them, the Gospel of Judas, The Da Vinci Code, and The Jesus Papers are just the latest clubs to use against their oldest and most obstinate enemy.” - Brian Saint-Paul, editor of Crisis Magazine, editorial "The Assault on Jesus", 9 May 2006; formerly available electronically from the Crisis website: http://www.crisismagazine.com

68                                           “As soon as one accepts that freedom is, in the first instance, non-interference [lack of prohibitions or requirements], one implicitly accepts the religion-as-tyranny view. Religion regulates not merely our relationship with God, not merely our attitude towards others, but even our relation to ourselves. Specifically, it demands submission to something greater, something transcendent, something objective, which re-connects the self with everything else. Religion interferes with unqualified personal choice, but this is not a limitation on freedom. It is an aide, a guide, a means to freedom. The best way to counter the ‘religion-as-tyranny’ crusade is not through one more attempt to water down the dogmatic or moral content of religion to satisfy the liberal craving for ever more freedom of choice. Such compromises are doomed to failure.”  - Louis Groarke, 'What is freedom? Why Christianity and Theoretical Liberalism cannot be reconciled', Heythrop Journal, XLVII (2006), p. 259.

67                                           “Take away the hope of arrival and our [spiritual] journey becomes the Battan death march. The best human life is unspeakably sad. Even if we manage to escape some of the bigger tragedies (and few of us do), life rarely matches our expectations. When we do get a taste of what we really long for, it never lasts. Every vacation eventually comes to an end. Friends move away. Our careers don't quite pan out. Sadly, we feel guilty about our disappointment, as though we ought to be more grateful. / Of course we're disappointed - we're made for so much more. 'He has also set eternity in our hearts,' (Eccl. 3:11)." - Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance. Drawing Closer to the Heart of God, Nashville, Tennessee (etc.), Thomas Nelson, 1997, pp. 179-180.

66                                            "The bishop who feels a call to evangelism should call evangelists and give them a task and the authority to carry it out, rather than waiting until the annual diocesan convention to ask that a committee be appointed representing the diversity of the diocese, which will bring back a report to the next convention, including a study of the budgetary implications for its proposals and a coordinated multi-step phased-in implementation plan." - David Mills, in his article 'Reorganizing Religion. Why the Church Bureaucracies Have to Go', published in Touchstone. A Journal of Mere Christianity, September 2004; available electronically at: http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-07-039-f

65                                            " ... the arguments from reason do provide some substantial reasons for preferring theism to naturalism. The "problem of reason" is a huge problem for naturalism, as serious or, I would say, more serious, than the problem of evil is for theists. But while theists have expended considerable effort in confronting the problem of evil, the problem of reason has not as yet been acknowledged as a serious problem for naturalism" - Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea. In Defense of the Argument from Reason, Downers Grove, Illinois, InterVarsity Press, 2003, p. 128.

64                                            " ... there are those who set their own judgement about what is right and wrong against that of the Bible or the Church or, indeed, any other outside authority. They say that things have changed since the days the Scriptures were written, that social conditions have changed, and that we must not be bound by the conventions of the past. Each person, they would say, must judge for himself what is right or wrong for him. ... The more one reads the Old Testament, let alone the New Testament, the plainer it appears that human nature has not changed much over the centuries and that the underlying motives of men are the same now as then; the basic elements of right and wrong have not changed, and the task of man is not to decide but to discover the moral law." - Robert Martineau, Moments that Matter, London, SPCK, 1976, p. 48.

63                                            "The aim of the religious quest, like the scientific quest, is to seek motivated belief about what is the case. ... religion can only be of real value if it's actually true. ... Religion is not just a technique for keeping our spirits up, a pious anaesthetic to dull some of the pain of real life. The central religious question is the question of truth. Of course, religion can sustain us in life, or at the approach of death, but it can only do so if it is about the way things really are." - John Polkinghorne, Quarks, Chaos and Christianity. Questions to Science and Religion, London, SPCK, 1994, 2005, pp. 9, 95.

62                                            "It is a tragic fact that in our present society we believe more in the destructive power of negative thinking than in the liberating truth of God's love. Bitterness and cynicism are the gods of our age. ... Often we totally lack any sense of self-awareness and responsibility. We love to put the onus for our lack of spiritual progress onto others or even onto God." - Tracy Williamson, Expecting God to Speak to You, Chichester, West Sussex, New Wine Press, 2005, p. 81.

61                                            "Trying to do the Lord's work in your own strength is the most confusing, exhausting and tedious of all work. But when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you." - Corrie ten Boom, as quoted in a feature on the famous Dutch Christian, on the ReJesus site: http://www.rejesus.co.uk/the_story/saint/saint8/quotes.html

60                                           "The final opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s led to revelations that ended any notion that atheism was quite as gracious, gentle, and generous a worldview as some of its more idealistic supporters believed. ... One of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that many of the most deplorable acts of murder, intolerance, and repression were carried out by those who thought that religion was murderous, intolerant, and repressive - and thus sought to remove it from the face of the planet as a humanitarian act." - Alister McGrath, Dawkins' God. Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life, Oxford (etc.), Blackwell, 2005, pp. 113-4.

59                                                    "Spirituality has become the acceptable face of religion. It offers a language for the divine that dispenses with all the off-putting paraphernalia of priests and church. And it's not about believing in anything too specific, other than in some nebulous sense of otherness or presence. It offers God without dogma. ... Yes, spirituality is religion that has been mugged by capitalism." - Giles Fraser, God's Been Mugged, The Giles Fraser Column, Ekklesia web site.

58                                         "Sometimes I think that we talk a little too glibly about Christ's work in our lives. To really believe that the Lord from heaven is at work in our tiny little life is either arrogant nonsense or magnificent truth. A convinced Christian, of course, rules out the nonsense theory and is locked in to the truth theory. But to take this lightly is to do a massive truth grave injustice" - Stuart Briscoe, Bound for Joy. Philippians - Paul's Letter from Prison, Ventura, California, Regal Books, 1975, 1984, p. 15.

57                                         "The orthodox Faith makes no pretence of appealing to human reason as its ultimate justification. It insists indeed that it is inherently and fundamentally reasonable, but also that this reasonableness can only be seen by the perfect and infinite Intelligence who is God. Its acceptance by human beings has always ultimately rested upon their conviction that it is revealed by God, but it is confirmed by the fact that it gives a meaning to human life that nothing else can provide." - E. L. Mascall, The God-Man, Westminster, Dacre Press, 1940, pp. 39-40.

56                                        "Now there suddenly broke in on him like a sunrise a sense of God's mercy - deeper than the fore-ordination of things, like a great mercifulness ...  Surely, surely, behind the reign of law and the coercion of power there was a deep purpose of mercy." - Edward Leithen's re-discovery of God's love, in John Buchan's novel Sick Heart River (US: Mountain Meadow), London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1941, p. 203.

55                                        "But the more important battle, as shown in [the Book of] Job, takes place inside us. Will we trust God? Job teaches us that at the moment when faith is hardest and least likely, then faith is most needed. His struggle presents a glimpse of what the Bible elsewhere spells out in detail: the remarkable truth that our choices matter, not just to us and our own destiny but, amazingly, to God himself and the universe he rules." - Philip Yancey, Disappointment With God. Three Questions No One Asks Aloud [Is God unfair? Is God silent? Is God hidden?], Grand Rapids, Michigan, Zondervan, 1988, 1992, p. 200.

54                                       "If you do not believe in a personal God the question: 'What is the purpose of life?' is unaskable and unanswerable. To whom or what would you address the question?" - J. R. R. Tolkien, in a letter to a young person quoted by Joseph Pearce in Tolkien: Man and Myth. A Literary Life, London, HarperCollins, 1998, 1999, p. 211.

53                                               "The obsession with 'community' ... manifests itself in several ways. The most obvious is in the language of the new liturgies. In a deliberate attempt to return to the consciousness of the Early Church, the Creed no longer begins 'I believe ...' but 'We believe ...' ... It is a translation justified by theology and history, but not by practice, for even in post-Vatican-II Rome it is still 'Credo...' [I believe] and the most superficial knowledge of Anglicans suggests that each person believes something very different from his neighbour and chooses which portions of Christian doctrine he is able to accept for himself." - Gavin Stamp in The Church in Crisis, by Charles Moore, A. N. Wilson and Gavin Stamp, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1986, p. 141.

52                                    "Now if I'd seen him, really there, really alive, it'd be like a fever. If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, who wanted 'em like a father and cared for 'em like a mother ... well you wouldn't catch me sayin' things like "There are two sides to every question", and "We must respect other people's beliefs". You wouldn't find me just being gen'rally nice in the hope that it'd all turn out alright in the end, not if the flame was burning in me like an unforgivin' sword ..." - Granny Weatherwax, in Terry Pratchett's novel Carpe Jugulum, London, Corgi Books, 1999, p. 349.

51                                    "... Sir Isaac Newton was ... actually an alchemist, and ... by far the greater part of his writings was devoted to alchemy and interpreting the Book of Revelation. We choose to ignore the truth about the history of natural philosophy. It doesn't fit into the story of human progress as we like to tell it." - Terry Jones and Alan Ereira in Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, London, BBC Books, 2004, p. 134, writing about the myth of Newton's revelation of the reality of physical nature and its laws, as in Alexander Pope's famous epitaph.

50                                    "... the phrase 'authority of scripture' can only make Christian sense if it is a shorthand for 'the authority of the triune God, exercised somehow through scripture'." -  N.T.Wright in Scripture and the Authority of God, London, SPCK, 2005, p. 17.

49                                    "The first letter of John (3.8) tells us that the Son of God appeared for the very purpose of undoing the devil's work ... The devil's work is manifold, and not all of it is obvious. The occult is but a small part of his empire ... " "Occultism covers a very wide field ... It is not 'religion', not even 'false religion', but fringe science or alternative science. The true occultist is not worshipping anything (not even Satan) but is trying to use secret powers to his own advantage." - Deliverance. Psychic disturbances and occult involvement  (report of the Christian Deliverance Study Group (Church of England)), ed. Michael Perry, London, SPCK, 2nd. ed., 1996, pp. ix, 60.  

48                                    "There are approximately two hundred and fifty political 'nations' in the world today. Christians are under pressure in all but about thirty, and that number shrinks annually. Churches everywhere need to prepare their members for suffering and sacrifice." - David Pawson, in Explaining the Second Coming, Sovereign World, Trowbridge, England, 1993, pp. 23-4.

47                                    "Atheism ... will never accept responsibility. Militant atheists certainly will never say, 'We have dictated the moral shape of society for nearly half a century, and what we now see is the failure of our disastrously wrong assumptions about the moral nature of human beings'. ... Atheism has taken over the media, the entertainment industry, the education of teachers, and the caring professions. The full price to be paid in future years in social consequences cannot be imagined." - Peter Masters, in The Cruelties of Atheism, London, Sword & Trowel (Metropolitan Tabernacle), 1994, 1998, pp. 7, 12.

46                                     "The most insidious error of our severe philosophical theologians is to set aside the life to come as a thing indifferent, a matter of no concern, which Christians may or may not believe. What? Do we see God in this life? Is it a matter of no concern, a thing indifferent, whether we are ever to attain our only end?" - Austin Farrer, in The End of Man, London, SPCK, 1973, p. 4.

45                                    “As a church we no longer believe (on the whole) that things can be reversed if only we pray for revival, or if only we focus on evangelism, or if only we reshape the liturgy, or if only we all use the same evangelistic programmes …” – Stephen Croft, “Negotiating tensions”, in The Future of Ministry. Looking Ahead 25 Years, ed. Gavin Wakefield, Grove Pastoral Series, Grove Books, Cambridge (England), 2004, p. 5.

44                                    "Failure is the end of almost every good beginning. God himself had to contend with it almost immediately after creation. But that did not stop him from continuing on, determined to finish what he started. Perhaps the greatest temptation of all is to surrender when our plans fail, but in retrospect it is almost always possible to see how initial disappointments and failures led in the end to a greater success than we had initially believed possible." - Mark Eddy Smith, A Closer Look at The Lord of the Rings, Eastbourne, Kingsway Publications, 2002, p. 59.

43                                   "The Bible as well as all the revelations claimed in other religions merely acts as a signpost to show us the way to God. Jesus is himself the way. We not only discover the way to God through him, but we also find God in him for he is God. He not only reveals; he is the revelation."- Martin Goldsmith, What About Other Faiths? Is Jesus Christ the Only Way to God?, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1989, 2002, p. 43.

42                                  "Having destroyed the family, which for all its defects had the capacity to prize and shelter old people, the humanistic cult of progress thoughtfully showers us with more old people [by way of health care programmes] - people for whom no invented institutions can really provide. The ultimate irony of humanism is that it has produced such a viciously inhuman world." - David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, New York, Oxford, etc., Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 92.

41                                “Satanism is a blatantly selfish, brutal philosophy. It is based on the belief that human beings are inherently selfish, violent creatures, that life is a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest, that only the strong survive and the earth will be ruled by those who fight to win the ceaseless competition that exists in all jungles – including those of urbanized society. Abhor this brutal outlook if you will; it is based, as it has been for centuries, on real conditions that exist in the world we inhabit rather than the mystical lands of milk and honey depicted in the Christian Bible”. - Burton H. Wolfe’s Introduction to Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible,  Avon Books (HarperCollins), New York, 1969, p. [18] (This is the book which inspired a man (October 2004) to declare himself a Satanist, and be allowed to practice Satanic rituals in his place of work (a British warship), permission being granted in compliance with the official policies of his employer, the Royal Navy).

40                                "It is a common assumption that, in order to survive, churches must accommodate to the age. But in fact, the opposite is true: In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture. As a general principle, the higher a group's tension with mainstream society, the higher its growth rate." - Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth. Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity, Wheaton, Illinois, Crossway Books, 2004, p. 261.

39                               "... segmentation of the concept of truth is completely alien to historic Christianity, which teaches that spiritual truths are firmly rooted in historical events. Paul went so far as to say that if Christ's resurrection had not happened in real history ... then our faith would be worthless [1 Corinthians 15] ... Of course, the Resurrection is not only an historical event; it also has profound and far-reaching spiritual implications. But the point is that the two are not partitioned off from one another: An event that did not occur can have no spiritual implications." - Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth. Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity, Wheaton, Illinois, Crossway Books, 2004, p. 116.

38                              "There is in Anglicanism a strong rationalistic and moralistic tradition of thought, going back beyond [19th] century liberalism to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Latitudinarians ... , and beyond this to the Platonism of the Renaissance. Its habit is to assume that all human beings naturally aspire towards God and goodness, to treat the moral and religious intuitions of educated people as ultimate certainties, and to take seriously only those elements of biblical teaching that fit in with them. Naturally, those who stand in this tradition concentrate on ethics, soft-pedal the themes of sin and grace, and tend constantly to endorse in practice the ... doctrine of salvation by sincerity ...  It is this tradition which has led to the taunt that Pelagianism - salvation by moral effort alone - is the Englishman's special heresy!" - J. I. Packer, God Has Spoken, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1965, 1979, 1993, 1998, p. 60.     

37                             "It is no use our saying 'I believe God is love, but I do not believe in his wrath.' How do we know, we know nothing about God. We would not know that he was love were it not that we are told it. But the book that tells us that God is love also tells us that God hates sin and is going to punish it. We either take it all or reject it all. We cannot bring our minds in at certain points, and reason here and there. That is what people are doing today, and there is no gospel left and the churches are being emptied. I am not surprised. All hell is being let loose, and it will get worse." - Martyn Lloyd-Jones, I am Not Ashamed. Advice to Timothy [sermons preached in 1964], London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1986, pp. 48 and 49.

36                            "... the so-called "historical-critical method" [of Biblical criticism] ... is not an open-minded inductive study of the evidence. Rather, ancient literature is studied and past events reconstructed with certain rigid presuppositions of what could or could not have happened. This is done, however, in the name of scientific objectivity. ... This positivistic or naturalistic view of history is not an element of Christian tradition but a product of the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It results from trying to treat history as though it were a natural science."  ...  "... in fact, only the "hypothesis" of [Jesus's] actual bodily resurrection adequately explains the known facts. The only reason for not accepting the "biblical hypothesis" is the conviction that it cannot be true -i.e., to have a closed mind to a real possibility." - George Eldon Ladd, I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1975, pp. 23, 140 (author's italics).

35                            "... if all are agreed that love is a good thing, then why not 'the more of it the merrier'? Why not free love all round? ... The answer is that random sex is self-destructive. ... The great adventure of Western civilization has brought us on a fool's errand through nothing more fertile than sage brush desert and dry plain, to deposit us in a dreary township, or to a shack in an industrial slum. Abandoning God and the traditional virtues, we follow a mirage of freedom into the wilderness littered with concrete and chromium-plated motels from which there is no escape except through fantasy, insanity and death." - Michael Green on sexual "freedom", (as seen in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita), Jesus Spells Freedom, London, Inter-Varsity Press, 1972, pp. 66, 67.                             

34                            "I have seen pictures of Eichmann and Hitler and people like that, and I'm sure there are thousands of those like that today that I believe are dominated by evil. But even that I think is a power outside themselves. I've seen on the television screen some of those people that I think are evil, but I think there's a supernatural evil power that's dominating them. And in Jesus' day they would call it demon possession. ... we're all born with a tendency to evil within us, of hate and lust and greed, and that's called original sin." (Billy Graham) - David Frost, Billy Graham in Conversation, Oxford, Lion Publishing, 1997, p. 108.

33                            "The intellectual forces of the Christian Church need to be mobilized in answer to a movement whose leaders are involved ... in nothing less than the decomposition of our civilization. It is time to submit the half-truths and sly insinuations of the new anti-Christian establishment to ruthless scrutiny. We need to analyze the machinery of discourse by which it operates.  ... If we do so, we shall discover that the more deeply we dig down through the slogans and the verbiage, the emptier the supposed foundations of fashionable liberal relativism will be seen to be." - Harry Blamires, The Post-Christian Mind, London, SPCK, 2001, p. 1.

32                             "The proper combination of faith and obedience can be summed up in one word: holiness. Holiness means being so much full of God that there is no room for anything else. That means that we no longer love the world or the things of the world such as the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. Instead of doing the things of the world, a holy person does the will of God." - Peter C. Wagner, "Spiritual Warfare", in the book Territorial Spirits, edited by him, Chichester, England, Sovereign World Ltd., 1991, p. 8-9.

31                             "The different claims of different religions constitute a real problem which cannot be glossed over by any simplistic talk that of course all religions are really saying the same thing. They are not. Sometimes they offer alternative, mutually exclusive, ways of viewing the world. ... Any religion, like Christianity, that claims to be true, need not give up that claim just because there are rival claimants to the truth, with apparently different standards of what constitutes rational justification for it." - Richard Harries, The Real God. A Response to Anthony Freeman's God in Us, London, Mowbray, 1994, pp. 72, 73.

30                            "The notion that strong sexual attraction can't possibly be withstood is one of the most fashionable fairy tales of our present culture. The reality is we can say no as well as yes - God gives us free will, not biological slavery" - Rev. Lewis Hall, in Susan Howatch's novel The Heartbreaker, London, Little, Brown, 2003, p. 249.

29                            "In other words [according to Arthur Leff, of the Yale Law School; an atheist], only if there is a God who is Himself ultimate Goodness and Justice is there any ultimate moral grounding for the law. And if there is no God, Leff argues, then nothing and no one can take His place. Nothing else can function as the grounding of morality - no person, no group, no document - because all of these can be challenged. All of these are susceptible to the defiant challenge you hear kids say to their parents or on the playground: "Sez who?" Everything except an infinite God is susceptible, he says, to "the grand sez who?" " - Nancy R. Pearcey, "Why Darwinism Matters", (Washington DC Policy Briefing, 10 May 2000), Access Research Network, Nancy Pearcey Files, http://www.arn.org/docs/pearcey/np_dcpolicy0500.htm

28                                " ... what is the basis for any moral complaint about what Hitler did to the Jews if God does not exist? In a godless universe, what one 'animal' does to another 'animal' is ethically irrelevant, and there is no moral basis for anger or outrage against anything. Whatever happens happens, and that is all there is to it." - John Blanchard,  Does God Believe in Atheists?, Darlington (England), Evangelical Press, 2000, p. 521. See From My Bookshelf - Archive 6.

27                                "... recently many have come to doubt that human reason can supply the missing transcendent standard by which differing human moral beliefs can be evaluated. From a scientific standpoint, morality - like religion - is a matter of subjective belief rather than objective knowledge. That makes it effectively a matter of personal preference. This does not mean that moral codes will cease to exist ... but it does mean that those codes will be grounded on the preferences of local power holders rather than on universal principles of reason and knowledge. What is right or wrong depends on the preference of whoever has the power to impose his will." - Phillip E. Johnson, The Right Questions. Truth, Meaning & Public Debate, Downers Grove, Illinois, InterVarsity Press, 2002, p. 45-6.

26                        "The Catholic church believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom. Calvinism took away the freedom from man but left it to God. Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the Apocalypse chained the devil. It leaves nothing free in the universe. And those who assist this process are called the "liberal theologians". - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908; reproduced: London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, p. 189.

25                        "One of the greatest moments of growth in prayer arrives the day I can as it were walk away from my feelings, discount them completely. People fret because they don't 'feel' God is close, or even that God has 'deserted' them. ... Being poor in spirit is being happy with this state, happy as a rational creature to surrender oneself trustingly to this hiddenness" - Delia Smith, A Journey Into God, London, Spire (Hodder & Stoughton), 1988, p. 220.

24                        "The apparent difference between the "mystical" New Age view and the agnostic Secular Humanist view is no real difference at all. Both viewpoints are in perfect agreement in believing that nature is everything and we don't need God. Each exalts both human achievement and scientific progress. Each makes man a god, answerable only to himself." - Randy England, The Unicorn in the Sanctuary. The Impact of the New Age on the Catholic Church, Rockford, Illinois, Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1990, p. 138.

23                        "For man, spiritual being as he is, cannot rest in, or upon, a mere morality or ethical code. As the Confucians grafted a later form of Buddhism upon their morality in order to satisfy their innate demand for gods to worship, so the Englishman seeks an outlet for the spiritual and mystical tendencies of his nature, and too often finds it in some pseudo-religion, which is at bottom irrational and anti-Christian, though the latter fact is skilfully disguised by the use of Christian language and sentiments." - Bede Frost, Some Modern Substitutes for Christianity, London and Oxford, Mowbrays, 1942, 1949, p. 13.

22                        "Who that is honest surveying the happenings of recent decades - the millions and millions who have been killed or uprooted from their homes, the wanton destruction, the almost inconceivable cruelties of a Hitler and a Stalin, the crazed quest for wealth and excitement - can seriously maintain that we are moving forwards spiritually, morally or even materially? ... The trouble with all earthly quests, however admirable they may be in intent, however earnestly promoted by their advocates, is that they are liable to triumph." - Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered, London, Fontana, 1969, 1974, p. 108.

21                    " ... no great moral structure like the Early Church, based as it was upon lifelong persecution and personal suffering, could have reared its head upon a statement which every one of the eleven apostles knew to be a lie. ... Whatever the explanation of these extraordinary events [after Jesus's death] may be, we may be certain that it was not that." - Frank Morison on the alleged deception of the apostles' claims of Jesus's resurrection, in Who Moved the Stone?, London, Faber, 1930, 1958, 1962, 1963, etc., etc.,  p. 89.

20                "The humanists pretend to esteem the human being above all else. In reality, as the Humanist Manifesto II [1973] shows, the humanist takes away all worth from mankind. Unless our worth is rooted and grounded in something objective, and outside ourselves, we are of value only to ourselves, and can never rise above the impermanence of our own short lives. The God of Christianity is outside our finite and transitory universe and His love for us gives us a value which transcends not only ourselves but our finite universe as well." - Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Understanding Secular Religions, San Bernardino, California, Here's Life Publishers Inc., 1982, pp. 83-4.

19                "... seeking is only serious if the seeker is following some clue, has some intuition of what it is he seeks, and is willing to commit himself or herself to following that clue, that intuition. Merely wandering around in a clueless twilight is not seeking. The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about "what is true for me" is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death." - Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, London, SPCK, 5th impression, 1994, p. 22. 

18                    "The contemporary celebration of the body and of sexual feelings is typical of any nature religion in which 'natural' equals 'good'. ... Whatever one's body is naturally inclined toward is believed to be right, for the body is part of Nature. Whenever the human mind, the human conscience or human society ... objects to the body's inclinations, this is deemed wrong. This is because mind, conscience and society are all part of Man, an untrustworthy being, while body is part of Nature, which may be trusted. This kind of ultimately religious thinking lies behind much of the scientific effort to disentangle the influences of the environment (human) from heredity (natural) on human behaviour". - J. A. Walter, The Human Home. The Myth of the Sacred Environment, Tring, Lion, 1982, pp. 32-3.