The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.

The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.

Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.

For the Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work.