pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them.

Isaac Watts, of course, is a hymn writer in the tradition of Congregationalism who lived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He is very interesting and important because he was also a metaphysician. He knew a great deal about what was, for him, contemporary science. He was very much influenced by Isaac Newton, for example. There are planets and meteors and so on showing up in his hymns very often. But, again, the scale of his religious imagination corresponds to a very generously scaled scientific imagination.

It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.