“We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.”

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”

“For it is beyond doubt that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those, who, being so removed from this source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transmission does not only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust. For what is more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a share, that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence? Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man.”

“What we cannot change we must endure without bitterness.”

“We must fight their falsehood with our truth, but we must also fight the falsehood in our truth.”

“In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.”