Quotes About Churchmen

English churchmen have long gazed with love on the primitive church as the ideal of Christian perfection, the Eden wherein the first fathers of their faith walked blameless before God and passionless towards each other.

Thomas Aquinas may have given the impression that God was just another item—albeit the highest—in the chain of being, but he had personally been convinced that these philosophical arguments bore no relation to the mystical God he had experienced in prayer. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leading theologians and churchmen continued to argue the existence of God on entirely rational grounds.

Be grateful for holiness when you find it among churchmen, but do not expect it. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others.

In my experience, his reaction was typical of many churchmen when lay people like myself try to explain the irrational using the 'God's Plan' argument. They raise an eyebrow and look at you as if you're slightly bonkers.

The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men.

I think you'd agree that as far as marriage is concerned, there are two types of churchmen. One set feels that marriage distracts them from serving God as well as they can, and the other set feels that as single men they can't serve God properly because they're continually distracted by loneliness and by wondering (as the naval ratings would say) where the next fuck was coming from.

In all of these centuries there has not been the slightest shadow of change in the nature of God or in His attitude toward sin. The Bible teaches from the beginning to the end that adultery and fornication are sin, and the attitude of churchmen does not alter its character.

Alas," mused Roger Bacon, "it is not only the public which so often fails to appreciate the nature of our more delicate investigations—many of our leading churchmen are particularly lacking in the finer faculties of discernment. Led by the twin banes of intolerance and ignorance, they too often condemn where they rightly should revere. They traduce what should be championed. They denounce what should be praised.

That our nation is in the throes of a moral collapse of serious dimensions is, apparently, no longer a debatable conclusion. Liberal and conservative spokesmen vie to see who shall express the conviction most vigorously. Churchmen and secularists, too, agree that we have fallen upon evil days. These various groups naturally differ as to the reasons for the situation, but that it exists no one seems prepared to deny.

If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church; Cubbert all College...Each brother candidly recognized there were a few unimportant scores of millions outside in civilized society, persons who were neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected.

It is significant, for example, that the moment when churchmen began to doubt the existence of the black man's soul was the same moment the black man's body was fetching high prices in the marketplace for their mercantilist cousins and parishioners.

Churchmen sought to introduce rational trial procedures and sophisticated legal principles in place of the superstition-based trial by ordeal that had characterized the Germanic legal order.

The moral sense had grown so strong in matters of sex that Churchmen could now brand a king as licentious. Boniface from Germany censured Ethelbald for the "twofold sin" which he committed in nunneries by using the advantages of his royal position to gain himself favours otherwise beyond his reach.

All too many churchmen view the undisciplined & amoral products of statist education as evidences of the failure of these schools. On the contrary, they are evidences of their success.

But this was Dublin, the nation's capital. The place of my birth and a city I loved at the heart of a country I loathed. A town filled with good-hearted innocents, miserable bigots, adulterous husbands, conniving churchmen, paupers who received no help from the State, and millionaires who sucked the lifeblood from it.