'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) |