Cordatus · Laudo

Fig. 6.1 - We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about 'pie in the sky,' and being told that we are trying to 'escape' from the duty of making a happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is 'pie in the sky' or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric. If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced, whether it is useful at political meetings or no.
• Heaven - Randy Alcorn

fig. 6.2 - There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed, that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that...
...Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fullfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
• Heaven - Randy Alcorn

fig. 6.3 - Let us greet the day which assigns each of us to his own home, which snatches us from this place and sets us free from the snares of the world, and restores us to paradise and the kingdom. Anyone who has been in foreign lands longs to return to his own native lands.... We regard paradise as our native land.
• Cypriam, 3rd century church father

fig. 6.4 - This place [heaven] is not an eternal realm of disembodied spirits, because human beings are not suited for such a realm. A place is by nature physical, just as human beings are by nature physical (We are also spiritual). What we are suited for — what we've been specifically designed for — is a place like the one God made for us: Earth.
• Heaven - Randy Alcorn

fig. 6.5 - God uses suffering and impending death to unfasten us from this earth and to set our minds on what lies beyond
• unknown

fig. 6.6 - The man who is about to sail for Australia or New Zealand as a settler, is naturally anxious to know something about his future home, its climates, its employments, its inhabitants, its ways, its customs. All these are subjects of deep interest to him. You are leaving the land of your nativity, you are going to spend the rest of your life in a new hemisphere. It would be strange indeed if you did not desire information about your new abode. Now surely, if we hope to dwell for ever in that "better country, even a heavenly one," we ought to seek all the knowledge we can get about it. Before we go to our eternal home we should try to become acquainted with it.
• J.C. Ryle

fig. 6.7 - We do not desire to eat gravel. Why? Because God did not design us to eat gravel. Trying to develop an appetite for a disembodied existance is like trying to develop an appetite for gravel. No matter how sincere we are, and no matter how hard we try, it's not going to work. Nor should it.
• Heaven - Randy Alcorn

fig. 6.8 - We have "believed" ourselves into a blind alley in many cases. Many who go around "believing" never really get very much. But these born-again ones, these born of the mystic birth, believed, in that they were not cynics or doubters or pessimists. They took an optomistic, humble, trusting attitude towards Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. They received Him, and "as many as received Him... gave He power..." (John 1:12).
Note that the word receive is not passive. Passive is when I receive the action; active is when I perform the act. We have come to the religion of passivity in our day. Towards God everyone is passive. So we "receive" Christ; we make it a passive thing!
But the Bible knows absolutely nothing about passive reception, for the world receive is not passive but active. We make the word receive into "accept." Everyone goes around asking, "Will you accept Jesus? Will you accept Him?" This makes a brush salesman out of Jesus Christ, as though He meekly stands waiting to know whether we will patronize Him or not. Although we desperately need what He proffers, we are sovereignly deciding whether we will receive Him or not.
Let me repeat, passive reception is unknown in the Bible. There is not a hint of it within the confines of sacred Writ. I for one am tired of being told what to believe by people who parrot everyone else. You could put some of the ministers on perches and they would say, "Polly wants a cracker! Good morning!" all in the same tone of voice. If anyone challenges their line in their books and magazines and songs, they look over their religious noses and declare the person is either radical or touched with modernism.
• A.W. Tozer - Faith Beyond Reason

fig. 6.9 - Receiving Christ savingly is an act of the total personality. It is an act of the mind and of the will and of the affections. It is thus not only an act of the total personality, it is an aggressive act of the total personality.
• A.W. Tozer - Faith Beyond Reason

Fig. 5.1 - 'Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then it is My mythology. The words of Wisdom are also myth and metaphor: but since they do not know themselves for what they are, in them the hidden myth is master, where it should be servant: and it is but of man's inventing. But this is My inventing, this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination that you might see My face and live. What would you have? Have you not heard among the Pagans the story of Semele? Or was there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God?'
• The Pilgrims Regress - C.S. Lewis

fig. 5.2 - Security is the World's greatest enemy.
• Unknown

fig. 5.3 - The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that they might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.
• George MacDonald

fig. 5.4 - ...not have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.
• The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis

fig. 5.5 - 'The Landlord has taken the risk of working the country with free tenents instead of slaves in chain gangs: and as they are free there is no way of making it impossible for them to go into forbidden places and eat forbidden fruits. Up to a certain point he can doctor them even when they have done so, and break them of the habit. But beyond that point - you can see for yourself. A man can go on eating mountain-apple so long that nothing will cure his craving for it: and the very worms it breeds inside him will make him more certain to eat more. You must not try to fix the point after which a return is impossible, but you can see that there will be such a point somewhere.'
'But surely the Landlord can do anything?'
'He cannot do what is contradictory: or, in other words, a meaningless sentence will not gain meaning simply because someone chooses to prefix to it the words "the Landlord can." And it is meaningless to talk of forcing a man to do freely what a man has freely made impossible for himself.'
• The Pilgrims Regress - C.S. Lewis

fig. 5.6 - I wonder at the hardihood with which such persons undertake to talk about God. In a treatise addressed to infidels they begin with a chapter proving the existence of God from the works of Nature... this only gives their readers grounds for thinking that the proofs of our religion are very weak.... It is a remarkable fact that no canonical writer has ever used Nature to prove God.
• Pascal

fig. 5.7 - If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.
• The Magician's Nephew - C.S. Lewis

fig. 5.8 - "Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day in our world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals have, and still looked like men, so that you'd never know which were which?"
• The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

fig. 5.9 - "You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content."
• The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

fig. 5.10 - If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct influence from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.
• Unknown

fig. 5.11 - "Do you eat girls?" she said.
"I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms," said the Lion.
• The Silver Chair - C.S. Lewis

fig. 5.12 - "You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you," said the Lion.
"Then are you Somebody, Sir?" said Jill.
"I am."
• The Silver Chair - C.S. Lewis

fig. 5.13 - Good and Evil, then, are not on all fours. Badness is not even bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Ormuzd and Ahriman cannot be equals. In the long run, Ormuzd must be original and Ahriman derivative.
• Unknown

fig. 5.14 - The difference between the Christian and the Dualist is that the Christian thinks one stage further and sees that if Michael is really in the right and Satan really in the wrong this must mean that they stand in two different relations to somebody or something far further back, to the ultimate ground of reality itself.
• Unknown

fig. 5.15 - In the same way, if we use the vastness of space and the smallness of earth to disprove the existance of God, we ought to have a clear idea of the sort of universe we should expect if God did exist.
• Unknown

fig. 5.16 - ...There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
• The Last Battle - C.S. Lewis

Fig. 4.1 - "...The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument."
"How is that?"
"You heard what they said. If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue with themselves to show that their own doctrines are true."
"I see. And what is the cure for this?"
"You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits."
• The Pilgrims Regress - C.S. Lewis

fig. 4.2 - Far from attacking the spiritual life, the cultured World patronizes it.
• C.S. Lewis

fig. 4.3 - Contempt is a well-recognized defensive reaction.
• I.A. Richards

fig. 4.4 - I do not admire the excess of some one virtue unless I am shown at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue. A man does not prove his greatness by standing at an extremity, but by touching both extremities at once and filling all that lies between them.
• Pascal

fig. 4.5 - Modern thought begets Freudianism on baser, Negativism on finer, souls.
• The Pilgrims Regress - C.S. Lewis

fig. 4.6 - These men are interested in everything not for what it is, but for what it is not, and talk as if they had 'seen through' things they have not even seen, and boast of rejecting what was never in fact within their reach.
• The Pilgrims Regress - C.S. Lewis

fig. 4.7 - In one night the Landlord - call him by what name you would - had come back to the world, and filled the world, quite full without a cranny. His eyes stared and His hand pointed and His voice commanded in everything that could be heard or seen, even from this place where John sat, to the end of the world: and if you passed the end of the world He would be there too.
• The Pilgrims Regress - C.S. Lewis

fig. 4.8 - You will not sleep, if you lie there a thousand years, until you have opened your hand and yielded that with his not yours to give or withhold. You may think you are dead, but it will only be a dream; you may think you are come awake, but it will still only be a dream. Open your hand, and you will sleep indeed - and then wake indeed.
• George MacDonald

fig. 4.9 - The cure of death is dying. He who lays down his liberty in that act receives it back
• unknown

Fig. 3.1 - The path for the followers of Christ was a stonier road than ever men had been told to follow before. Its principles demanded a new sort of heroism, more severe than that of the Law of the Jews, more sacrificing of self than the old Roman virtue.
• Russell Kirk

fig. 3.2 - "We are all asked to be heroes, each in his own circumstances. We are misled by our perspective. In seeing the heroic as too large for ourselves, we have been deceived and cheated by man-made philosophies that see human purpose as far too small." Our purpose is none other than to glorify God, and every Christian has been set free to do exactly that.
Naturally we don't like to think that God expects us to be heroic, because it means a lot more work; it means dying to ourselves and letting God be in control; it means being uncomfortable and sometimes even persecuted. "Every man," writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself." And each of these excuses comes from the flesh. When we listen instead to God, we will find that He is calling us to sacrifice everything.
• unknown

fig. 3.3 - Only the selfless man lives responsibly and this means that only the selfless man lives.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer

fig. 3.4 - Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.
• G.K. Chesterton

fig. 3.5 - Once upon a time, the King put on the clothes of a beggar and walked among us. Although the King was discovered and killed, He conquered death and set His people free. Today He sits on the throne and the war is won, but the question still remains: Who will follow Him? Who will serve as His eyes, ears, feet and hands, and demonstrate His rule to a fallen world? Who will take the challenge to obey His orders, even when it means risking family, friends, possesions, and our own life?
• unknown

fig. 3.6 - Knowledge of broken law precedes all other religious experience.
• The Pilgrims Regress - C.S. Lewis

fig. 3.7 - If Religion is a Wish-Fulfilment dream, whose wish does it fulfil?
• The Pilgrims Regress - C.S. Lewis

fig. 3.8 -Alas, what can they teach and not mislead,
Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
And how the world began, and how man fell.
• Milton

fig. 3.9 - "To look at this from a different perspective, why is Buddhism so popular in America today?" he asked. "My answer is simple: because you can be good without having God. If you can have a nice little dose of Spirituality from three to five in the afternoon and then dichotomize your life again and go live it any way you please - well, why not? A religion like that would have a lot of attraction.
"Why is Islam attractive to some? Because of geopolitical considerations. What is it about the Hindu faith that's attractive? It is rich in philosophy, and its tenet of treating the earth with reverence has some appeal today."
"Why not Christ?" I asked.
"Because he calls you to die to yourself," he replied. "Any time truth involves a total commitment in which you bring yourself to complete humility, to the surrender of the will, you will always have resistance. Christ violates our power and autonomy. he challenges us in areas of purity. John the Baptist came giving the law. People did not like it. Jesus came giving the message of grace and they said 'Why don't you give us the firmness of the law?' Whatever Jesus brings into culture, culture will want to change it. At the heart of the rejection is resistance to the claim of who He is.
"Buddhism and other religious systems basically tell people how to pull themselves up by their ethical bootstraps. I have never had a problem knowing what is right and wrong in most situations; what I have lacked is the will to do what is right. That's where Christ comes in. He says if you'll bring all of yourself to Him, He will not only give you eternal life, but He will change what you want to do in this life."
• The Case for Faith - Lee Strobel

Fig. 2.1 - What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one.
• G.K. Chesterton on Atheism

fig. 2.2 - Original sin is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.
• G.K. Chesterton

fig. 2.3 - Accepting the false distinction between faith and reason, or the sacred and the secular, leads to one of two extremes: either false monasticism or a Sunday School Christian. That is, either a Christian tries to lock himself away from the world in a hermitage (spending all his time in what he considers a "sacred" arena), or a Christian tries to lock himself away from the church (spending virtually all of his time in what he considers a "secular" arena). Christians are commanded to seek a balance between these extremes, being "in the world" but not "of the world" (John 17:15-18).
• Unknown

fig. 2.4 - There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is the reality of God, which has become manifest in Christ in the reality of the world. Sharing in Christ we stand at once in both the reality of God and the reality of the world.... There are, therefore, not two spheres, but only the one sphere of the realization of Christ, in which the reality of God and the reality of the world are united.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer

fig. 2.5 - Whoever professes to believe in the reality of Jesus Christ, as the revelation of God, must in the same breath profess his faith in both the reality of God and the reality of the world; for in Christ he finds God and the world reconciled.
• Deitrich Bonhoeffer

fig. 2.6 - I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
• C.S. Lewis

fig. 2.7 - The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn

fig. 2.8 - When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer

fig. 2.9 - Christians ask non-Christians, in effect, to trade in their desperate hope that man is trustworthy. As C.S. Lewis explains, the non-Christian is "no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence." And once a person realizes that men tend to betray confidences, it seems eminently reasonable to rely on the only Person worthy of our confidence.
• unknown

fig. 2.10 - Christ says 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your times and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you. I have not come to torment your actual self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down.
• C.S. Lewis

fig. 2.11 - Christianity is strange, It bids man to recognize that he is vile and even abominable, and bids him want to be like God.
• Blaise Pascal

fig. 2.12 - Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution, a being called from death into life, from blindness to sight, and from sin to heroism.
• G.K. Chesterton

Fig. 1.1 - The Bible is not just a book of mysticism or spirituality; it is a book that also gives geographical truths and historical truths. If you're an honest skeptic, it's not just calling you to a feeling; it's calling you to a real Person.
• Unknown

fig. 1.2 - It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous personalities - the good and the bad were thus bound together - that in the agonized womb of conciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

fig. 1.3 - The words of Christ should drive a man right out of his La-z Boy and right down to his knees. Complacency is the domain of the Frankenstein crowd. The Hyde crowd should feel first a desperate need to be reconciled to God, and then intense gratitude and a fierce desire to please the one who died to reconcile us.
• The Deadliest Monster - J.F. Baldwin

fig. 1.4 - The Bible charges out of the gate with a message that is grievously offensive to everyone: that even our righteous acts are like filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6).
• Unknown

fig. 1.5 - Selling sin short is only the reverse side of selling God short.
• Unknown

fig. 1.6 - The Frankenstein crowd can believe in their monster only so long as they don't look too closely at real human beings, these strange animals who laugh and love and fight and cry. The Christian response should begin with a reminder of how odd man really is.
• The Deadliest Monster - J.F. Baldwin

fig. 1.7 - The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn

fig. 1.8 - We look and behold man instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea... To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbor, to his God: an idea of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it were possible, he will not stoop.... Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, this hair crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal...
• Robert Louis Stevenson

fig. 1.9 - The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world...
• C.S. Lewis