Batch the Fourth

If your highness shall be pleased to command me to the Turk, or Jew, or Gentile, I will go on my bare feet to serve you; but from the Welsh, good Lord, deliver me. And I shall beseech you to send me no more into this country, if you intend I shall do any service, without a strong party to compel them, not to entreat them. And then I will give them cause to put me in their Litany, as they have now given me cause to put them in mine.

Sir Thomas Dabridgecourt ( apparently in the grip of powerful emotions ) at Chepstow in 1644, writing to his commander, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, after being ordered back to the Royalist cause in Wales.

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Men end up neither saving their souls nor adding to the stock of human glory here and now. The trouble is most men prefer to steer a middle course, which is very harmful; for they know not how to be wholly good or wholly bad. ... It is much better to be either magnificently bad or perfectly good.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

Nicolo Machiavelli. 1469 - 1527.

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God gave all men all earth to love,

But, since our hearts are small,

Ordained for each one spot should prove

Beloved over all.

' Sussex'. 1902

I'm just in love with all these three,

the Weald and Marsh and the Down countree.

Nor I don't know which I love the most,

the Weald or the Marsh or the white Chalk coast !

'A Three-Part Song'. Dymchurch Flit in 'Puck of Pook's Hill'.

Rudyard Kipling. 1856 - 1936.

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Better a decent hypocrisy than a bold, truthful, cruelty. The moment a man accepts the appearance of decency, he has to spend a certain proportion of his public life behaving in a decent manner. And a hypocritical good example is better than a sincere bad one.

Pamela Hansford Johnson. Meadrow Unitarian Chapel Newsletter. December 1999.

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My life hath been a mixture of crosses and comforts.

Captain Sir Richard Whitbourn. 'A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land'. 1620.

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Everything has a rational explanation, ... Just that most people's idea of what's rational is severely limited.

I don't know what to say about this kind o' thing,' [ possibly supernatural events - JAW ] Gomer said. 'When I was a boy, people laughed. When my granny was a girl, nobody laughed. What's that ? Barely a century. For hundreds of years, folk never questions there's more in an orchard, more in a cornfield. Few decades of computers and air-conditioned tractors, even the farmers thinks it's all balls. Sad, en't it. Computers and air-conditioned bloody tractors.

Phil Rickman. 'The Wine of Angels'. 1998.

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I despise Reason if it severs me from my soul and from God.

Queen Antiope of the Amazons. In Steven Pressfield's 'Last of the Amazons'. Doubleday 2002.

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My shoe pinches me in a place you do not have.

Traditional saying. Anon.

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Æelfscine. = Old English word for 'as lovely as an Elf' ( + slight undertones of danger )

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We have within us, the eternal immense, omnipotent, infinite Lord and Maker of all things; and we are within this infinite being; wherever we are, we have Him with us.

God is love. We have this loving and most lovely God always with us; and always in us, why do we not run to His embraces ? He is a fire that ever burns; this fire is in the very centre of our souls; how is it that we feel so little of its flames ? It is because we will not stand by it. It is because we will not keep our souls at home, attentive to that great guest who resides within us, but let them continually wander abroad upon vain created amusements.

Bishop Richard Challoner 1691 - 1781. Heroic Sussex-born ( 'Protestant Lewes' in fact ! ) leader of the persecuted 18^th century English Catholics.

From Chapter XXIV of 'Think Well On't'. 1728

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If you have a trouble,

tell it not to the weakling.

Tell it to your saddle-bow,

and ride forth singing.

Prayer of King Alfred the Great. 849 - 901.

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He thought no man sincere, nor woman honest, out of principle; but that whenever they proved so, humour or vanity was at the bottom of it. No one, he fancied, served him out of love, and therefore he endeavoured to be quits with the world by loving others as little as he thought they loved him.

Bishop Gilbert Burnet ( 1643 - 1715 ) on King Charles II ( 1630 - 1685 ).

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Preliminary context: Communist East Germany - but think present day 'political correctness'.

As authors we were always trying to be ahead of the censor, to second-guess his instinct about what was 'on' and what was 'off'. That meant that we put ourselves in the position of the censor, we composed our texts with an eye on this super-ego. After a couple of decades doing this, we got so used to this second opinion lurking in our heads that we considered it our own. We believed that we were writing in freedom and under no one's influence, but we weren't. That was the most odious aspect of this system - it allowed us to believe we were free and we wanted to believe in our liberty too. So we played along with our own oppression.

Writer Gunter Künert, quoted in 'The Saddled Cow - East Germany's Life & Legacy' by Anne McElvoy. 1992.

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' ... we shall certainly not advance matters by jumping up and down shrilling 'Darwin is God and I, so-and-so, am his prophet'

Errol White ( an evolutionist ). Presidential address to the Linnean Society of London. 1966.

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Just as pre-Darwinian biology was carried out by people whose faith was in the Creator and His plan, post-Darwinian biology is being carried out by people whose faith is in, almost, the deity of Darwin. They've seen their task as to elaborate his theory and to fill in the gaps in it, to fill in the trunk and twigs of the tree. But it seems to me that the theoretical framework has very little impact on the progress of the work in biological research. In a way some aspects of Darwinism and of Neo-Darwinism seem to me to have held back the progress of science.

Colin Patterson, senior palaeontologist at the Museum of Natural history. BBC broadcast and 'The Listener' article 1981.

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Heaven never helps the men who will not act.

Sophocles. 495? BC - 406 BC.

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