“The Romantic poet wishes to be absorbed into Nature, the Elizabethan, to absorb her” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 341).
When Vice Gets Good Press
“When did we no longer appreciate that to dignify certain modes of behavior, manners, and ways of being with artistic representation was implicitly to glorify and promote them?” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 55).
No Little Decisions
“Every son of Adam was at one point a fertilized egg. The moment before millions of sperm were vying to be the one. During the course of that day, how many actions affected the outcome of this most fascinating race? This sperm results in this individual (along with the many thousands of this individual’s descendants), …
Medieval and Protestant
“In that way the Arcadia is a kind of touchstone. What a man thinks of it, far more than what he thinks of Shakespeare or Spenser or Donne, tests the depth of his sympathy with the sixteenth century . . . It gathers up what a whole generation wanted to say. The very gallimaufry that …
Can’t Have It Both Ways
“A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham’s law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 52).
A Bragging Fog
“I am married now, but have no idea whether or not it is God’s will for me to be married tomorrow. How would a mist know something like that? This is why James tells people not to boast, saying that they will go here and there, making big bucks as they go. he says that …
A Dazzling Figure
“Even at this distance Sidney is dazzling. He is that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied . . . poet and patron of poets, statesman, knight, captain — fate has dealt such hands before, but they have very seldom been so well played” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the …
Sign of Spiritual Election
“Until then I had assumed, along with most of my generation unacquainted with real hardship, that a scruffy appearance was a sign of spiritual election, representing a rejection of the superficiality and materialism of bourgeois life. Ever since then, however, I have not been able to witness the voluntary adoption of torn, worn-out, and tattered …
Books Other Than the Bible
“The writing and reading of God-honoring books is not a substitute for Bible reading; it is the result of Bible-reading . . . The teaching of Scripture on this point [Eph. 4:11-12; Neh. 8:7-8] is very clear. God requires uninspired teachers to exposit His Word and apply it to the lives of God’s people . …
The Puritan Defense of Poesy
“The defence of poetry will not be rightly understood unless we keep two facts carefully in mind. In the first place, it is a defence not of poetry as against prose but of fiction as against fact. The word poetry often covered all imaginative writing whether in prose or verse, and even those critics who …