It is part of the meaning of suffering that it is that which cuts athwart our purposive movements. It represents the denial from beyond ourselves of … - H. Richard Niebuhr

Tolstoy ... can center his attack on the conscious beliefs, the tangible institutions, and the specious customs of society. He is not content simply to withdraw from these himself and lead a semimonastic life; he becomes a crusader against culture under the banner of the law of Christ.

In Protestant history the sect has ever been the child of an outcast minority, taking its rise in the religious revolts of the poor, of those who were without effective representation in church or state. ... By its very nature the sectarian type of organization is valid only for one generation. The children born to the voluntary members of the first generation begin to make the sect a church long before they have arrived at the years of discretion.

Faith is at least as much an unavoidable counterpart of the presence of God as sense experience is an unavoidable counterpart of the presence of natural entities.