I never received from him a harsh word

Not only was he a pastor in all he wrote, but he was a firmly rooted Anglican churchman with a strong allegiance to the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles. He had a huge heart and huge respect for Dissenters and those on the outside, like Charles Spurgeon,40 but he was unbudging in his passion that the Church of England, rightly administered was the best church on earth.41 “The standpoint I have tried to occupy, from first to last, is that of an Evangelical Churchman.”42 His passion was for the reformation and renewal of his own denomination, in accord with the great biblical principles of the Reformation.

The place is still known as Tell al-Jahudija (Hill of the Jews) today.

You ought so to realize the promise as to be sure that it means what it says, and then you will naturally begin to ask how it will come to pass

Ah, beloved, I leave your own thoughts, as I must just now leave mine, to peer into the depths of sin which must lie in what we sometimes talk of so flippantly, namely, doubts and fears. They are not the trifles which some men dream them to be: they are hideous profanities of sacred truth, revolting libels upon immaculate goodness, horrid blasphemies of infinite love

In the year that Sabit had been confined, Chen Quanguo was transforming Xinjiang. Cherished symbols of Muslim heritage—shrines, mosques, cemeteries—were systematically targeted for destruction. Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged, with minarets pulled down and decorative features scrubbed away or painted over

It is not denied by its recent assailants that it was the doctrine of the leading Reformers, or that it was unanimously adopted and professed by all the churches which they founded, whether Lutheran or Calvinistic, with one singular exception only—the Church of England,—which, it seems, is neither Lutheran nor Calvinistic, and, of course, not Protestant,—and yet not Popish,—but purely Catholic and Apostolical! It is now alleged that the Reformed doctrine is a ‘novelty,’ which was introduced for the first time in the sixteenth century, and which, for fifteen hundred years, had been unknown to Catholic Antiquity, or the Church Universal; and that the Anglican Establishment, having always adhered to a complex rule of faith, composed of the Scriptures as interpreted by the Fathers, is unlike all other Protestant churches in this—that she has never adopted or sanctioned this novelty as part of her authorized creed.

If the doctrine of Justification by grace through faith be, as it unquestionably is, the only sovereign and effectual antidote to each of the two great tendencies of the age,—the tendency to Rationalism, on the one hand, and the tendency to Ritualism, on the other

may be found in the fact, that, of late years, and within the ranks of Protestantism itself, it has been openly assailed, as having no place either in the formularies of the Church of England, or in the writings of the Christian Fathers, or even in the Word of God itself

for we believe, and are warranted by the whole history of the Church in believing, that Theology, like every other science, is progressive

The new fact of reality is that God cannot be traded with as a man. There is nothing that man can offer to God that is not already his. You cannot exchange value for value with one from whom you have life, breath, and everything. You must, as a creature, own up to your total dependence on mercy and be content with it or, by an act of irrational rebellion, evict yourself from the realm of reality and try to live a contradiction.

In view of the nature of reality, the rational man’s highest value will be the admiration and enjoyment of his Maker and Redeemer. This value implies at least three others: First, it implies the value of knowing and being with God. The virtues that aim to achieve this value are study of and meditation upon divine realities. The second value implied in my admiration of God is the value of summoning others to see how valuable God is so that they can admire and enjoy his excellence. This is implied because it is a psychological necessity to want to increase my joy in God’s beauty by admiring it in another’s admiration for it. When the beauty of God is reflected in my neighbor’s delight in that beauty, my joy in that beauty is compounded. The virtue which aims to achieve this value is called evangelism or witness or apologetics. The third value implied in my admiration and enjoyment of God is a style of behavior in inter-human relationships which advertises the value I place upon the mercy of God. It is precisely here where Ayn Rand’s contempt for mercy would have to be altered. If I am to be true to my highest value—the excellence of God including his mercy—my behavior will have to reflect it in merciful acts.

Why was there this conflict here? I think it was due to Rand’s thoroughgoing immanentalism: the complete rejection of a divine or supernatural dimension to reality. If she was right in her atheism and naturalism, then I think her system was consistent at the point of demanding only justice. Given the scope of reality that Ayn Rand took into account, the axiom A is A demands that men always trade value for value.

Happiness, for Ayn Rand, “is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction”

The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one

Honesty: “This is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud . . . honesty . . . is the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others

My philosophy in essence is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute