Preaching Christianity to skeptics

Preaching Christianity to skeptics without first setting out the praeambula fidei [preambles of faith], and then complaining when they don’t accept it, is like yelling in English at someone who only speaks Chinese, and then dismissing him as a fool when he doesn’t understand you. In both cases, while there is certainly a fool in … Read more

Never, in all my

Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble: ‘Once upon a time!’ … I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had … Read more

For it was Saturday

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out … Read more

Nothing is more disgusting

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act. Ralph Waldo Emerson