It's time to play... Mystery Quotations!

by Dan Phillips

These quotations all come from the same source. Who do you think said them? When? Where?

First:

Let us not fear the opposition of men; every great movement in the Church from Paul down to modern times has been criticized on the ground that it promoted censoriousness and intolerance and disputing.

Second:

Mysticism unquestionably is the natural result of the anti-intellectual tendency which now prevails; for mysticism is the consistent exaltation of experience at the expense of thought. But in practice mysticism is seldom consistent; indeed it cannot possibly be consistent if it seeks to explain itself to the world. The experience upon which it is based, or in which it consists, is said to be ineffable; yet mystics love to talk about that experience all the same.

Third:

The depreciation of the intellect, with the exaltation in the place of it of the feelings or the will, is, we think, a basic fact in modern life, which is rapidly leading to a condition in which men neither know anything nor care anything about the doctrinal content of the Christian religion, and in which there is in general a lamentable intellectual decline.

Fourth:

Facts, in the sphere of education, are having a hard time. The old-fashioned notion of reading a book or hearing a lecture and simply storing up in the mind what the book or the lecture contains--this is regarded as entirely out of date. A year or so ago I heard a noted educator give some advice to a company of college professors--advice which was typical of the present tendency in education. It is a great mistake, he said in effect, to suppose that a college professor ought to teach; on the contrary he ought simply to give the students an opportunity to learn.

This pedagogic theory of following the line of least resistance in education and avoiding all drudgery and all hard work has been having its natural result; it has joined forces with the natural indolence of youth to produce in present-day education a very lamentable decline.

Fifth:

...nothing makes a man more unpopular in the controversies of the present day than an insistence upon definition of terms. Anything, it seems, may be forgiven more readily than that. Men discourse very eloquently today upon such subjects as God, religion, Christianity, atonement, redemption, faith; but are greatly incensed when they are asked to tell in simple language what they mean by these terms. They do not like to have the flow of their eloquence checked by so vulgar a thing as a definition.

Have fun. Bunch of smart cookies like you, I bet someone will nail it. And no fair Googling! Then I'll unveil the source in the Comments section, after you've played with it awhile. (This will form the basis for a later post, DV.)

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