“When you say that [without faith, a man can no more receive Christ or take any steps towards it than a dead man can walk or speak,] I respond:

1. This doesn’t prove that faith is equivalent to a power or capacity in the same way. It simply highlights its absolute necessity without addressing its nature. For example, if you show an illiterate person a Greek or Hebrew book, they can’t read it, just like a dead person can’t—both scenarios are truly impossible in a combined sense. However, in one case, it’s merely a lack of skill or habit, while in the other, it’s a natural ability. Similarly, it’s true that a habitual sinner may struggle to do good, just as a leopard can’t change its spots or a person can’t change their skin color. Yet, if you’re suggesting that they’re equally distant from actual change as a dead person, it’s not an accurate comparison. A dead person lacks both natural faculties and moral inclination or power, while an unbeliever lacks only the latter.”

—Richard Baxter
‘The Reduction of a Digressor’

“Church traditions, especially when they do not run contrary to the faith, are to be observed in the form in which previous generations have handed them down; and the use of one church is not to be annulled because it is contrary to that of another.”

-St. Jerome, Letter 71

Paul uses the term “the body of death” because the body is subject to vices and sickness, disorders and death until it rises in glory with Christ, and what was once fragile clay is purified in the fire of the Holy Spirit into a very solid rock, changing its glory, not its nature.

- St. Jerome

True strength of will is calm; in calmness it is persevering so that it does not become discouraged by momentary lack of success or by any wounds received. No one is conquered until he has given up the struggle.

-Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange

If they believe in Christ, let them assist me who am about to fight for His name. If they do not, let the dead bury their dead.

-St. Jerome

All people are under God's care; but he has a particular regard to his church. This is the signet on his hand, as a bracelet upon his arm; this is his garden, which he delights to dress; if he prunes it, it is to purge it; if he digs about his vine and wounds the branches, it is to make it more beautiful with new clusters, and restore it to a fruitful vigour.

—Stephen Charnock

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

-Aristotle

“When the family shall no longer have a head, and the great foundation for the subordination of children in the mother's example is gone; when the mother shall have found another sphere than her home for her energies; when she shall have exchanged the sweet charities of domestic love and sympathy for the fierce passions of the hustings; when families shall be disrupted at the caprice of either party, and the children scattered as foundlings from their hearthstone, — it requires no wisdom to see that a race of sons will be reared nearer akin to devils than to men. In the hands of such a bastard progeny, without discipline, without homes, without a God, the last remains of social order will speedily perish, and society will be overwhelmed in savage anarchy.”

~R.L. Dabney

“O, drive back confidently the peoples desirous of war, cut in pieces those who harass us, and let all workers of iniquity - those who are minded to seize the
inestimable Treasure of the Christian people within Jerusalem, to pollute our holy Mysteries, and to possess themselves of the heirdom of the sanctuary of God - be thrust from the city of the Lord!

Let the twofold sword of the faithful fall upon the skulls of their enemies, to destroy everything which vaunts itself against the knowledge of God, which is the Christian faith! - lest the heathen say, “Where is their God?”


- St. Bernard of Clairvaux, De Laude Novae Militiae

"Never can it truly be said that man is justified before God by works, as much by those performed apart from grace, which merely are sins, as by those done in grace, even though these..can never be so good, that we may be justified before God through them."

- Cardinal Pole