The Plight of Man and the Power of God

Top Highlights

“As man’s sense of responsibility to God has declined, and as he has ceased to believe that God has ordained the whole of life, including the natural orders of society, so the ideas of the family and home, of marriage and parenthood, and, indeed, of law and order in general, have become looser and looser, and men have regarded themselves as being laws unto themselves.” (Pages 82–83)

“Man, says St Paul, started with the knowledge of God, and if he lacks it now it is because he has deliberately suppressed and lost it. The story of man with respect to God, according to the Apostle, is not one of gradual progress and development and rising, but rather one of decline and fall—retrogression.” (Page 20)

“As a rule the decay of religion works out in the second generation as moral rigidity, and in the third generation as the breakdown of all morality. Humanity without religion has never been a historical force capable of resistance. Even today, severance from the Christian faith, whenever it has been of some duration, works out in the dehumanization of all human conditions. ‘The wine of life has been poured out’; the dregs alone remain.’” (Page 37)

“The trouble with mankind is not that it does not know enough about the truth. It deliberately denies the truth. Its difficulty is not that its advance in the direction of truth is somewhat slow and laboured. It prefers to go in the opposite direction. Its problem is not that it lacks sufficient light, but rather, as we are reminded in John 3:19, that ‘men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil’” (Page 64)