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It is like the Bishop who said that if we totally disarmed he had too high an opinion of human nature to think that anybody would attack us. There mi… - Herbert Butterfield
" "It is like the Bishop who said that if we totally disarmed he had too high an opinion of human nature to think that anybody would attack us. There might be great virtue in disarming and consenting to be made martyrs for the sake of the good cause; but to promise that we should not have to endure martyrdom in that situation, or to rely on such a supposition, is against both theology and history. It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.
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About Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield (October 7, 1900 – July 20, 1979) was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for a slim volume entitled, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).
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Sir Herbert Butterfield
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Additional quotes by Herbert Butterfield
Humanism and Humanitarianism, Liberalism and Internationalism...emerge as a result of a tendency to translate into secular terms certain movements and aspirations which had characterised a Christian civilisation... humanitarianism, for example, is an anaemic substitute for the doctrine of New Testament love.
An American writer, studying English nationalism in the age of Cromwell, reminds us of the influence of the Old Testament—the belief that we were God's Chosen People—which still leaves its mark on the character of our national tradition. It may have led us to hypocrisy at times—saddling us with too great a burden of self-righteousness. But, says this writer, at least it has prevented English nationalism from becoming so completely amoral as that of some of the modern pagan forms of state.
We have to be on our guard when the whig historian tells us... that the Reformation is justified because it ultimately led to liberty... for it is possible to argue against the whig historian that the ultimate issue which he applauds only came in the long run from the fact that, in its immediate results, The Reformation was disastrous to liberty.
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