Quotes about Tradition

Romanists again admit that many false traditions have prevailed in different ages and in different parts of the Church. Those who receive them are confident of their genuineness, and zealous in their support. How shall the line be drawn between the true and false? By what criterion can the one be distinguished from the other? Protestants say there is no such criterion, and therefore, if the authority of tradition be admitted, the Church is exposed to a flood of superstition and error.

The Romanist then believes because the Church believes. This is the ultimate reason. The Church believes, not because she can historically prove that her doctrines have been received from the Apostles, but because she is supernaturally guided to know the truth. 'Common consent,' therefore, is practically abandoned, and tradition resolves itself into the present faith of the Church.

Romanists argue that such is the obscurity of the Scriptures, that not only the people, but the Church itself needs the aid of tradition in order to their being properly understood. But if the Bible, a comparatively plain book, in one probable volume, needs to be thus explained, what is to explain the hundreds of folios in which these traditions are recorded? Surely a guide to the interpretation of the latter must be far more needed than for the Scriptures.

But good hymns? They live past the people who wrote them. Hymns never die.

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God's existence—know that he is—not his essence, or what he is.

Maximus has been called unscriptural, but Scripture is the background and the presupposition for all that he does, to a wholly different degree than in the one-sided scholastic theology or spiritual works of the sixth century. The Confessor's first major work is his set of answers to the questions of his friend Thalassius on passages in the Holy Scriptures. Maximus offers these answers from the fullness both of the exegetical and spiritual tradition and of his own personal meditation.

The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. Whatever influence I ever had over mamma, I lost at the age of three.

Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry. Except in America, rejoined Lord Henry, languidly.