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Faith and/or Reason
and Experience, Worship & the Spirit
John Milton, from the "Areopagitica", in The Best of the World's Classics (Funk and Wagnalls Co.: 1909), pp. 141-3.
I cast not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness. Which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.
C.S. Lewis on Paganism said...
Surprised by Joy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1955), 235.
With the irreligious I was no longer concerned; their view of life was
henceforth out of court. As against them, the whole mass of those who
have worshiped — all who had danced and sung and sacrificed and
trembled and adored — were clearly right. But the intellect and
conscience, as well as the orgy and the ritual, must be our guide.
There could be no question of going back to primitive, untheologized
and unmoralized, Paganism. The God whom I had at last acknowledged was
one, and was righteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of
religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? or
where was the awakening?