Church Quotes - page 58
YLERMI: The church will fall down before / the mitten parts from the stone! / The walls will crumble before / the finger rots on the wall! / Before that, may a time come / too, another, harsher time / which will not bow down to death, / will not crawl off to Mana. // He spurred the horse, and the flames / engulfed his golden helmet. / The mitten's on the stone still.
Eino Leino
In his 1918 diary, Hermann Hesse recalled a dream in which he heard two distinct voices. The first told him to seek out forces to overcome suffering, to calm himself. It sounded like parents, school, Kant, the church fathers. But the second voice-which sounded farther off, like "primal cause"-said that suffering only hurts because you fear it, complain about it, flee it.
Marilyn Ferguson
Ridgway and I climbed a ladder inside the tower to the belfry, spoke to the sergeant observer there, and looked over the landscape on the German side of the river. Then Ridgway turned to the sergeant and at length asked him to put a mortar concentration on a point of woods a few hundred yards away on the German side. The sergeant, unperturbed, cranked his field telephone and spoke to someone at the mortar position in the fields behind the church. "Joe," he said, "remember the dead horse we used as an aiming point yesterday? This target is about fifty over and 100 left. Ten rounds when you're ready." The rounds were in the air almost at once, and their accuracy was impeccable; but I was far from happy about the way my sergeant had shortcut the standard methods of adjusting fire as prescribed in the mortar manual. Although an artilleryman and not the expert on infantry weapons which Ridgway was, I was sure the "dead horse" method of adjustment was not in the book.
Maxwell D. Taylor
In modern industry the managerial groups in many areas rise to a position more significant than that of the owners or the workers. Decision often rests largely in their hands, providing, of course, they are able to point to a generous measure of financial success in their particular enterprise. Wages to the workers, profits to the owners, prices and goods to the consumers--these are allocated in great measure by the managers of the concern and tolerated on the terms just stated.
The managerial group develops also in other social groups as well as in industry. Labor, agriculture, and professional associations tend to set up a strong structure in which the managerial skills and personalities are very prominent. In the ecclesiastical groupings this form of organization has long been evident, not only in the Catholic church but in other creeds and organizations as well.
Charles Edward Merriam
Unhappily, a love of walls has seized you; unhappily, the Church of God which you venerate exists in houses and buildings; unhappily, under these you find the name of peace. Is it doubtful that in these Antichrist will have his seat? Safer to me are mountains, and woods, and lakes, and dungeons, and whirlpools; since in these prophets, dwelling or immersed, did prophesy.
Hilary of Poitiers
Satan's design in instigating the French revolution was to create an alarm throughout Europe, especially among the influential class, unfavorable to liberty, and so illustrate in France the theory that, were the superstitions of Rome to be overthrown and liberty to be given full sway, all law and order would speedily end. This was a master-stroke of policy, worthy of its author, and designed, as the prophet shows, to overwhelm the "woman" (the reformed Church), and to drive all conservatives and peace-lovers - rulers and ruled - back to union and harmony with Papacy. The failure of the scheme was not due to lack of craftiness in its designer, but to the overruling power of God, whereby he is able to cause all things to work together for good.
Charles Taze Russell
Judaism was a divinely appointed type of the Millennial Kingdom of Christ which will control and regulate all matters; hence Judaism was properly a union of church and state - of religious and civil government. But, as we have already shown, the Gospel Church was in no sense to be associated in, or to have anything to do with, the government of the world, until her Lord, the King of Kings, comes, assumes control, and exalts her as his bride to share in that reign of righteousness. Neglecting the Lord's words, and following human wisdom, theories and plans, the great system called Christendom, embracing all governments and creeds professing to be Christ's (but a miserable counterfeit of the true Kingdom of Christ), was organized before the time, without the Lord, and of wholly unfit elements. The fall of Babylon as an unfit church-state system, and the gathering out of the worthy wheat, therefore, can be and is well illustrated by the fall of Judaism.
Charles Taze Russell
Glancing along the pathway of the Church, from Luther's day until now, we can see that, step by step, reform of cleansing has progressed; for each set of reformers, as soon as they accomplished their own little item of cleansing, stopped and joined the others, in opposition to all further reform or cleansing.
Charles Taze Russell
I should not base it [ the mural-painting 'Madonna della Vallicella' Rubens painted c. 1607] on the estimate of Rome but leave it to the discretion of His Highness [the Duke of Mantua].... though the figures [but withdraw it for the light in the church was to strong there] are saints, they have no special attributes or insignia that could not be applied to any other saints of similar rank.
Peter Paul Rubens
How strong the expression, "She is become the habitation of demons, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird." How true it is, that the most execrable of society seek and wear the garb of Christian profession and ceremonialism, in some of the various quarters (sects) of Babylon. Every impure principle and doctrine, somehow and somewhere, finds representation in her. And she is a "cage" which holds securely not only the Lord's meek and gentle doves, but also many unclean and hateful birds. Of all the defaulters, and deceivers of men and of women, how many are professedly members of Christ's Church! and how many even use their profession as a cloak under which to forward evil schemes! It is well known that a majority of even the most brutal criminals executed die in the Roman Catholic communion.
Charles Taze Russell
Some of God's children, the "holy people", the writer among the number, though not associated with the "Miller movement", nor with the denomination subsequently organized, which calls itself the "Second Advent Church," have been looking at and "earnestly waiting" for Michael's Kingdom; and gladly we bear testimony to the "blessedness" of the wonderfully clear unfoldings of our Father's plan, at and since the fall of 1874 - the end of the 1335 days.
Words fail us to express this blessedness! Only those who have been refreshed in spirit with this new wine of the Kingdom could appreciate it, if we could describe it. It is therefore something to be felt, rather than told. It was at and since the ending of those 1335 prophetic, symbolic days that the previous views of the Lord's presence, and the fact that we are even now living in the time of the "harvest" of this Gospel age, and in the time of the setting up of our Michael's (Christ's) Kingdom, came to be known.
Charles Taze Russell
