Sublime

God must mean, among other things, that mystical and multitudinous balance of all things, by which they are at least able to stand up straight and endure; and any scientist who pretends to have exhausted this subject of ultimate sanity, I will call the lowest of religious fanatics.

Lydgate could only say, ‘Poor, poor darling!’ but he secretly wondered over the terrible tenacity of this mild creature. There was gathering within him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamond. His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every

In Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge is a benevolent intermediary between the realm of eternal forms and the realm of mutability;

The pastor, then, must do something much more difficult than our ancestors had to: she must contend that a personal God can act in an impersonal universe and therefore challenge the theory that the universe is closed.

Il était universaliste. Il espérait une disparition des religions traditionnelles au fur et à mesure que les hommes se voueraient plus nombreux à une exhaustive compréhension du cosmos. Nous avons abordé ce sujet il y a quelques années. Spinoza est le rationaliste par excellence. Il voit dans le monde un courant ininterrompu de causalités.

There is to be “one royal lie,” which, Plato hopes, may deceive the rulers, but will at any rate deceive the rest of the city. This “lie” is set forth in considerable detail. The most important part of it is the dogma that God has created men of three kinds, the best made of gold, the second best of silver, and the common herd of brass and iron. Th

Marsiglio, on the contrary, still aims at preserving the unity of the Catholic faith, but wishes this to be done by democratic means, not by the papal absolutism. In practice, most Protestants, when they acquired the government, merely substituted the King for the Pope, and thus secured neither liberty of private judgement nor a democratic method o

The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires i