Men have, for the most part, done with lamenting their lost
faith. Sentimental tears over the happy, simple Christendom of
their fathers are a thing of the past. They are proclaiming now
their contempt for Christ's character, and their disgust at the
very name of love. Scorn and hatred, difference and division, must be more than ever our lot, if we would be the followers of Christ in these days. Conventional religion and polite unbelief are gone forever.- John Neville Figgis (1866-1919), The Gospel and Human Needs, London: Longman's, Green & Co., 1911, p. 152

God loves matter. In his original creative acts God
affirmed matter again and again, declaring it good at every
point along the way. We, therefore, should take the material
world quite seriously; it is the "icon" of God, the epiphany of
his glory. We must not dismiss material things as
inconsequential--or worse yet, as genuinely evil. The stuff of
the material world--what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called
"holy matter"--has been created by God and again he declared it
good, very good (Gen. 1:25,31). The material world is intended
to enhance human life.- Richard J. Foster, Streams of Living Water, Harper San Francisco, 1998, p. 260

I feel it a duty to bear my solemn testimony against the spirit of the day we live in, to warn men against its infection. It is not Atheism I fear so much, in the present times, as Pantheism. It is not the system which says nothing is true, so much as the system which says everything is true. It is not the system which says there is no Savior, so much as the system which says there are many saviors, and many ways to peace! It is the system which is so liberal, that it dares not say anything is false. It is the system which is so charitable, that it will allow everything to be true. It is the system which seems ready to honor others as well as our Lord Jesus Christ, to class them all together, and to think well of all.

It is the system which is so careful about the feelings of others, that we are never to say they are wrong. It is the system which is so liberal that it calls a man a bigot, if he dares to say, "I know my views are right." This is the system, this is the tone of feeling which I fear in this day, and this is the system which I desire emphatically to testify against and denounce. From the liberality which says everybody is right, from the charity which forbids us to say anybody is wrong, from the peace which is bought at the expense of truth – may the good Lord deliver us! ~ J.C. Ryle, Knots Untied, “Only One Way of Salvation” [Cambridge, England: James Clarke & Co., 1977], 30, 31.

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words. A lie may be told by silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by a glance of the eye attaching a peculiar significance to a sentence. All these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie plainly worded. No form of blinded conscience is so far sunk as that which comforts itself for having deceived because the deception was by gesture or silence instead of utterance.-John Ruskin

Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.- Walter Bagehot, 1826 - 1877