The Spirit of Second Spring
various authors

 

'Truth considered in itself and in the effects natural to it, may be conceived as a gentle spring or water-source, warm from the genial earth, and breathing up into the snow drift that is piled over and around its outlet.  It turns the obstacle into its own form and character, and as it makes its way increases its stream.  And should it be arrested in its course by a chilling season, it suffers delay, not loss, and waits only for a change in the wind to awaken and again roll onwards.'
S.T. Coleridge, The Friend, I, 65


 'It is the coming in of a Second Spring; it is a restoration in the moral world, such as that which yearly takes place in the physical.'
John Henry Newman, The Second Spring, 1952


'Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come.  For the winter is now past, and the rain is over and gone.  The flowers have appeared in our land... the fig tree hath put forth her green figs; the vines in flower yield their sweet smell.  Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come.'
The Song of Songs


'We are only just beginning to understand how intimately and profoundly the vitality of a society is bound up with its religion.  It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture.  The great civilizations of the world do not produce the great religions as a kind of cultural by-product; in a very real sense the great religions are the foundations on which the great vivilizations rest. A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.'
Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion, pp. 232-3


'The old Catholic religion-culture of Europe is dead and is being carried out to burial.  It cannot be raised from the tomb.  Its world year is over, has ended with midwinter  For its matter the inheritance of classical culture no longer exists.  It has been destroyed, overwhelmed by a vast influx of new knowledge, by the scientific mass civilization of the modern world.... [But] already in the winter there are signs of the approaching spring.... The abiding and immutable truth of metaphysics and revealed religion must be reclad in new garments woven by a scientific and historical knowledge incomparably vaster than was ever before possessed by man.'
E.I. Watkin, Catholic Art and Culture, pp. 159-69


'Our thanks are due to those who have so generously helped us by giving us a glimpse of what might be meant by a Pagan civilization.  And what is lost in that society is not so much religion as reason; the ordinary common daylight of intellectual instinct that has guided the children of men.'
G.K. Chesterton, 'The Return to Religion'

'In the soul which is united to God, it is always Spring.'
The Cure d'Ars


'The "Scouring of the Shire" ending with the last battle ever fought there... is followed by a second spring, a marvellous restoration and enhancement of beauty.'
J.R.R. Tolkien (Sauron Defeated, p. 129)