Quotes from Nicholas R. Needham

Nowadays, it's an offence even to be innocent in the eyes of the guilty; a person outrages the wicked simply by not joining in!

Scougal argued that this consisted not primarily in intellectual belief or in moral practice, but in a spiritual union between the soul and God, in which God's very life was transfused into a person.

The Germans who remained Pagan – the Franks, Angles, Saxons and Jutes – worshipped Wotan (or Wodin) as their chief god, together with other deities such as Thor (god of thunder), Tiwaz (god of war), Freya (goddess of fertility), and Saeter (a water-god). We derive the names of most our days from these Germanic gods: Tuesday (Tiwaz's day), Wednesday (Wodin's day), Thursday (Thor's day), Friday (Freya's day), Saturday (Saeter's day).

In Concerning the Trinity, Richard argued that the statement "God is love" requires God to be a Trinity; love must be a relationship between persons, and where two persons love each other perfectly, they will desire a third person whom they can both love in common.

The period which this Chapter covers witnessed the dawn of a revolution in Western worship – the introduction of musical instruments. As we saw in Volume One, the early Church did not use instruments in its worship, regarding them as Jewish or Pagan, but not part of the apostolic tradition of Christian worship.

We first hear of a musical instrument being used in Western worship in the 8th century, for in the year 757 the Frankish king Pepin presented an organ to the church of Saint Corneille in Compiegne, north of Paris.

In fact, it was not until after Aquinas, in the 14th and 15th centuries, that the playing of musical instruments became a widespread, regular and accepted feature of ordinary Western worship.