Neville Figgis Quotes

Christianity is not less, but ten thousand times more revolutionary than people think. That jaded middle-aged society of the Pagan Empire did well to see in the Church its foe, and to persecute a living spirit with the gift of Eternal youth. Some tell us that Jesus proclaimed a social gospel. So He did. But it was not that of Karl Marx or Henry George or any legislator. He came to upset the whole scale of values, and by changing men's desires to inaugurate a new epoch.

... art, like religion, appeals to the non-mechanical parts of our nature, to what in us is mystic and vital.

A society which leaves God out of the reckoning in all matters of family and sexual intercourse is bound direct for the rocks. At this moment indeed it the ethic of Christianity which is more unpopular than the creed. It hinders the free development of the individual in regard to society, or it is disliked as ascetic and unnatural in regard to the private life; and in business relations it is rejected on principle as mere sentimentalism.

Apart from the Christian hope, we are in a state of chaos, only the more appalling that it seems to be hardly realised. The chaos is all the greater that it applies not only to fundamental doctrines, but to practical ideals.

The atmosphere in literature and art, in novels and dramas, in newspapers and reviews is not only no longer Christian, but is largely anti-Christian, even on the ethical side. If you think of some of the names most honored of late, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H. G. Wells, or Mr. Henry James, none of them can be called Christian ...

Perhaps not many now read Tancred. ... Yet that book is far more than mere romance. It is evidence of the dissatisfaction with modern civilisation ...

... I do not conceive the scientific or mathematical temperament as in any way final. Large elements of life, the artistic, the social, the personal, it cannot handle, and when it tries to do so it is apt to come to grief, and this quite apart from religion.

How far can the new wine of modern knowledge and changed ways of thought be poured into the old bottles of traditional religion?

The object of Grotius was not to make men perfect or treat them as such, but to see whether there were not certain common duties generally felt as binding, if not always practised, and to set forth an ideal.

In the days of their triumph the Netherlands became the University of Europe; if we remove from the first half of the seventeenth century the thinkers, publicists, theologians, men of science, artists and gardeners who were Dutch, and take away their influence upon other nations, the record would be barren instead of fertile, despite the great name of Bacon.

In the struggle between liberty and authority the possession of a hostile printing press becomes of capital importance.

From the Monarchomachi we naturally pass to the Jesuits, the real agents of the Counter-Reformation, and partly also of Spanish aggression. Nearly all of the Jesuit writers of importance in the earlier years of their existence are Spaniards, or Philo-Spaniards. We must regard their attitude as partly, at least, determined by national feeling—even in spite of their professed aims.

Political liberty is the residuary legatee of ecclesiastical animosities.

It is the transformation of the desire to persecute into the claim of an inherent right to exist on the part of religious bodies that historically produces those limitations upon State actual which are the securities of freedom.

Jean Bodin is, next to Machiavelli, the most important political writer of the sixteenth century.