Topic: Virtue

Quotes

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.#
• 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. #

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.#

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.#

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.#

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.#