Quotes About Divines

Indeed, it was the conviction of some divines that God created night as proof of hell's existence.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a millionfold the age of the earth. But these same divines, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilisations; they can't even begin to concede that civilisations might have very old histories.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.

Some of our philosophizing divines have too much exalted the faculties of our souls, when they have maintained that by their force mankind has been able to find out God.

If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world. But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.

O]ur English divines are sounder in it than any in the world, generally: I think because they are more practical, and have had more wounded, tender consciences under cure, and less empty speculation and dispute (336-7).

This is my religion ... joy and exaltation in my own existence ... so go ahead and snarl ... bite ... howl, you Calvinistic divines and all you who say I am no Christian. I say you are not Christian.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Lazy ministers simply preached other men's sermons, sometimes helped by the profitable business of Reverend Dr. John Trusler, who specialized in "abridging the Sermons of eminent divines, and printing them in the form of manuscripts, so as not only to save clergymen the trouble of composing their discourses, but even of transcribing them." The great man of letters Samuel Johnson joked to his biographer James Boswell that he had never met a clergyman who was religious.

Divines are generally agreed that sin radically and fundamentally consists in what is negative, or privative, having its root and foundation in a privation or want of holiness. And therefore undoubtedly, if it be so that sin does very much consist in hardness of heart, and so in the want of pious affections of heart, holiness does consist very much in those pious affections.

Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.

At any rate, an attack upon Calvin or Turrettin or the Westminster divines does not seem to the modern churchgoer to be a very dangerous thing. In point of fact, however, the attack upon doctrine is not nearly so innocent a matter as our simple churchgoer supposes; for the things objected to in the theology of the Church are also at the very heart of the New Testament. Ultimately the attack is not against the seventeenth century, but against the Bible and against Jesus Himself.