Indulgent Puritans

But there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries.

- CS Lewis  (“Donne and Love Poetry” (1938), in Selected Literary Essays [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979], 116).  Cited by Doug Wilson.

deliver me, o God!

The thing that we most want to be saved from may be exactly what God intends for us to go through so that we are saved from something much worse.

If there is a hell, Rome is built over it

If there is a hell, Rome is built over it.

- An Italian proverb used by Luther upon visiting Rome and seeing the degradation of its religious leaders.

Litigiousness

When the republic is at its most corrupt the laws are most numerous (corruptissima re publica plurimae leges)

-Tacitus, Annals, III, 27.