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Why We Read the Fathers

Reason number 5,641 — this one from Herbert Butterfield’s remarkable little book Christianity and History, which I consumed while traveling last week:

Indeed after a period of fifteen hundred years or so we can just about begin to say that at last no man is now a Christian because of government compulsion, or because it is the way to procure favour at court, or because it is necessary in order to qualify for public office, or because public opinion demands conformity, or because he would lose customers if he did not go to church, or even because habit and intellectual indolence keep the mind in the appointed groove. This fact makes the present day the most important and the most exhilarating period in the history of Christianity for fifteen hundred years. … We are back for the first time in something like the earliest centuries of Christianity, and those early centuries afford some relevant clues to the kind of attitude to adopt.

One thought on “Why We Read the Fathers

  1. This makes a point rather more clearly than I had been thinking it. Just yesterday I was pondering that this is a time that calls for a conscious choice to stand with the Church, particularly on matters of purity and chastity. One must choose the good for its own sake, not just in order to fit in to society.

    Pascal hinted at this, back at the dawn of the modern era.

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