men without chests

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

CS Lewis, from The Abolition of Man, p. 26

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sensual sacraments

For as the word of God preached putteth Christ into our ears, so likewise these elements of water, bread, and wine joined to God's word, do after a sacramental manner put Christ into our eyes, mouths, hands and all our senses.

Thomas Cranmer, "The First Book of the Sacrament", from The Works of Thomas Cranmer, (ed. JE Cox), p. 41 .

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ex nihilo

Being young, and growing up, is like making something out of nothing. You cannot quite tell what you are. You do not know what you want to be. You have scarcely a notion of what you can be or do. And so you make yourself, by differentiating yourself from others. Later the differences will be qualitative; but at first they are only differences of degree.

Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching, p. 130

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spiritual self-assuredness

Of course you are not such wiseacres as to think or say that you can expound the Scripture without the assistance from the works of divine and learned men who have labored before you in the field of exposition . . . . It seems odd that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.

Charles Spurgeon, from Commenting and Commentaries (p.11) via Kelley Matthews' blog

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education for heaven's sake

Education, as classically conceived is not primarily for citizenship, or for making money, or for success in life, or for a veneer of "culture," or for escaping your lower-class origins and joining the middle class, or for professional or vocational training, whether the profession is honorable, like auto repair, or questionable, like law; and whether the profession is telling the truth, like an x-ray technician, or telling lies, like advertising or communications or politics. The first and foundational purpose of education is not external but internal: it is to make the little human a little more human, bigger on the inside.

The primary end of classical education, then, is in the student. But the student is a human being, and according to all the religions of the world (and therefore according to the vast majority of all people who have ever lived, in all times, places, and cultures), the ultimate end of final cause of a human being is something more than simply the mature flourishing of human powers, especially the powers of the mind, in this life. If this is true - if in fact this life is a gymnasium to train for another, sterner combat - then the ultimate purpose of classical education is there.

Peter Kreeft, "What is Classical Education?", The Classical Teacher (Memoria Press), Spring 2009.

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