We modern egalitarians are tempted to the primal sin of pride in the opposite way from the ancients. The old, aristocratic form of pride was the desire to be better than others. The new, democratic form is the desire not to have anyone better than yourself. It is just as spiritually deadly and does not even carry with it the false pleasure of gloating superiority.

You have an evil twin who is always with you. He is called your ego.

It is easier to compare concrete things in a fictional story with concrete things in real life than it is to compare abstractions with concrete things in real life (though both are honorable and necessary things to do).

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

Live in robust sanity, in holy obedience to the ordinary." (The Message) "In an insane asylum like the world, simple sanity can be a heroic achievement.

Our only qualitifcation for God's grace is our emptiness, not our fullness; our undeservingness, not our deservingness.

Thus moral theology leads us four steps deeper than law. To fulfill the moral law, we need love. To get love, we need union with God. To get union with God, we need the new birth. And to get the new birth, we need faith.