Quotes from David Dickson

I have taken all my good deeds and all my bad deeds, and cast them … in a heap before the Lord, and fled from both, and betaken myself to the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him I have sweet peace!

The usefulness of an elder will depend in the long run more on his character than on his gifts and knowledge.

Dublin is a big village and a dirty village where gossip reigns supreme'.

the gregarious intimacy, rare in a town of this size, the vivacious gossip, the cultural fizz, the wit and repartee at every social level . . .

The silent voices, unheard even in the twentieth century–the prisoners, the institutionalised patients, the casually abused–are silent in the historical record because they had very little influence over their personal fate or their city's shape.

By such means as the inculcating of parental instruction, the institution of classes for the children and young people of each congregation, the Church of Christ must seek to do the duty which she undertook when she received these little ones into the fold of the visible Church. She is not at liberty to make over her duty into the hands of parents, any more than parents are to throw over their responsibility on the Church. The

As "friends of the Bridegroom," to be helps and witnesses to the betrothal of sinners to Jesus; to stand by and see the salvation of God; to watch the operations of his hand; to guide and encourage his ransomed ones on their way Zionward; and to see many of them safe home before himself,—this is the privilege of a faithful elder. It

The family—how much of a nation's happiness and prosperity depends on that institution as a nursery, a school, a society, a sanctuary, a little church, and an emblem of the great family—"the whole family," part of which is in heaven, and part still on earth! There

No city exists in the present tense,' wrote James Stephens, Dublin journalist and poet in 1923, 'it is the only surviving mass-statement of our ancestors, and it changes inversely to its inhabitants. It is old when they are young, and when they grow old it has become amazingly and shiningly young again.

As in all pre-industrial mortality crises, it would have been quite normal for large numbers to flee the towns at the onset of an epidemic, and on this occasion such a response would have been entirely rational, for the impact of the plague was far more severe in confined and congested environments where rats (or whatever actually was the vector of the deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis) could breed and move freely around.

And it was telling that it took forty-three years to rebuild the single bridge across the Liffey after it collapsed in 1385, and that it was the abbot of St Mary's Abbey, not the justiciar or the merchants, who eventually oversaw the construction of what was the first fully stone bridge.

Whatever the muddy reality, the image of Dublin as an undefiled community of Norman/English families who had settled in the twelfth century, married amongst their own and upheld English law, customs and orthodox religion, was a compelling story.

I have taken all my good deeds and all my bad deeds, and cast them … in a heap before the Lord, and fled from both, and betaken myself to the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him I have sweet peace!