A glimmering of thought

The Son of God goes forth to war
A kingly crown to gain
His blood red banner streams afar
Who follows in His train?
Who best can drink his cup of woe
Triumphant over pain
Who patient bears his cross below
He follows in His train

That martyr first, whose eagle eye
Could pierce beyond the grave
Who saw his Master in the sky
And called on Him to save
Like Him, with pardon on His tongue
In the midst of mortal pain
He prayed for them that did the wrong
Who follows in His train?

A glorious band, the chosen few
On whom the Spirit came
Twelve valiant saints, their hope they knew
And mocked the cross and flame
They met the tyrant’s brandished steel
The lion’s gory mane
They bowed their heads the death to feel
Who follows in their train?

A noble army, men and boys
The matron and the maid
Around the Savior’s throne rejoice
In robes of light arrayed
They climbed the steep ascent of Heav’n
Through peril, toil and pain
O God, to us may grace be given
To follow in their train

Reginald Heber, 1827

Let it be known most assuredly that before God there is but one standard for right and wrong. And this standard is absolute, unchangeable, immovable. We shall all be judged according to this standard. Whatever we may say or feel or believe or surmise today, we will suffer loss on that day if what we do is not truly according to the will of God.

Watchman Nee in Spiritual Knowledge

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

~Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Harvard Address

The founders really were exceptional in a lot of ways, and gave us an exceptional form of government. It was exceptional because they knew that Americans could not be trusted with power, not any more than anybody else in history could be, and consequently gave us a government of checks and balances. They did it like this, in Madison's words, because they knew that men are not angels. The men who were not angels included a bunch of Americans with that lean, hungry look. We needed to be restrained, and our founders gave us a form of government designed, in the first, second, and last place, to restrain Americans tempted by the corruptions of power. They did this because they already saw the lust in our eyes.

But gardens always have serpents in them, and our serpent started up the myth of American innocence, an "exceptionalism" that is grounded in the bloom of youth on our idealistic cheeks, as we gazed out upon a world that needed saving. And it is this kind of crap that we hear non-stop in almost all our political speeches these days. And as soon as we accepted this version of exceptionalism, we became just like every other growing hegemonic collection of rationalizers, just as soon as the whiskey of empire got to the brain cells.

From his book, The Weight of Glory:

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
That Religion should be relegated to solitude in such an age is, then, paradoxical. But it is also dangerous for two reasons. In the first place, when the modern world says to us aloud, "You may be religious when you are alone," it adds under its breath, "and I will see to it that you are never alone." To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek calends.

Good stuff.

From an xkcd comment:

Fun game: try to post a YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: this is impossible)

I saw this post and just had to put it up.

"No doubt future social historians will find the contradiction between our concern about sexual abuse, on the one hand, and our connivance at and indifference to precocious sexual activity, on the other, as curious as we find the contrast between Victorian sexual prudery and the vast size of the Victorian demimonde"
(Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. 193).

Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

- Mark Twain