Tagged: Virtue

Quotes

Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1898)

• Thence it follows that the true Calvinist adjusts himself to these ordinances not by force, as though they were a yoke of which he would like to rid himself, but with the same readiness with which we follow a guide through the desert, recognizing that we are ignorant of the path, which the guide knows, and therefore acknowledging that there is no safety but in closely following in his footsteps.#

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

• When fear is suggested as the only motive for duty, every heart becomes rapacious or base.#

Augustine, City of God

• There is no true virtue except that which is directed toward that end in which is the highest and ultimate good of man.#
• Nevertheless, they who restrain baser lusts, not by the power of the Holy Spirit obtained by the faith of piety, or by the love of intelligible beauty, but by the desire of human praise, or, at all events, restrain them better by the love of such praise, are not indeed yet holy, but only less base.#
• If, then, one is nearer to God the more like he is to Him, there is no other distance from God than unlikeness to Him.#
• Vice, too, is so contrary to nature, that it cannot but damage it. And therefore departure from God would be no vice, unless in a nature whose property it was to abide with God. So that even the wicked will is a strong proof of the goodness of the nature. But God, as he is the supremely good creator of good natures so he is of evil wills the most just ruler, so that while they make an ill use of good natures, he makes a good use even of evil wills.#
• In scripture they are called God’s enemies who oppose his rule, not by nature, but by vice; having no power to hurt him, but only themselves. #

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

• Christians who are tempted to think that those who stoned to death the first martyrs must have been worse men than they themselves are, ought to remember that one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.#

Max Stackhouse, “A Protestant Response (in Caesar’s Coin Revisited)” (1996)

• The Aristotelian and Thomistic concepts of virtue and the humanistic understanding of it as the cultivation of innate goodness were undercut by the Reformation insistence that human effort could not add to human merit for the purposes of salvation.#

Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

• His [Jesus’] love of God and his love of neighbor are two distinct virtues that have no common quality but only a common source. Love of God is adoration of the only true good; it i gratitude to the bestower of all gifts; it is joy in holiness; it is “consent to Being.” But the love of man is pitiful rather than adoring; it is giving and forgiving rather than grateful; it suffers for and in their viciousness and profaneness; it does not consent to accept them as they are, but calls them to repentance.#