Westminster Quotes

The Seven Social Sins are: Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. Politics without principle. From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.

Everyone marries the Duke of Westminster. There are a lot of duchesses, but only one Coco Chanel.

The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. ["Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming," The Westminster Review, 1885.]

No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

The splendor of a human heart that trusts it is loved unconditionally gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”, Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, the sight of 10,000 butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.

My petal. Westminster’s toy had tea issues. Thank Biffy and Lyall. Toodle pip. A.

Why, Hurst couldn’t have hit the side of Westminster Abbey with a pistol, even by throwing the silly thing.

If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse. Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn’t you. Nobody knew that better than Jackson Lamb. And nobody played it better than Di Taverner.

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives... I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power." John Stuart Mill ( British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 68 )

I had meant my promise to George. I had said that I was, before anything else, a Boleyn and a Howard through and through; but now, sitting in th shadowy room, looking out over the gray slates of the city, and up at the dark clouds leaning on the roof of Westminster Palace, I suddenly realized that George was wrong, and that my family was wrong, and that I had been wrong-- for all my life. I was not a Howard before anything else. Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love, I didn't want the rewards for which Anne had surrendered her youth. I didn' want the arid glamour of George's life, I wanted the heat and the sweat and the passion of a man that I could love and trust. And I wanted to give myself to him: not for advantage, but for desire.

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever

To quote a famous philosopher revered in my time 'But this is no different from regular life. When have you ever known what's going to happen in the future?'" Wait a minute, Jonah thought. I said that. Back at Westminster, with Katherine. Does that mean I'm going to be a famous philosopher in the future? Does that mean I'm going to be revered? There wasn't time to ask.

If I speak in the tongues of Reformers and of professional theologians, and I have not personal faith in Christ, my theology is nothing but the noisy beating of a snare drum. And if I have analytic powers and the gift of creating coherent conceptual systems of theology, so as to remove liberal objections, and have not personal hope in God, I am nothing. And if I give myself to resolving the debate between supra and infralapsarianism, and to defending inerrancy, and to learning the Westminster Catechism, yea, even the larger one, so as to recite it by heart backwards and forwards, and have not love, I have gained nothing.

Harriet said, "You shouldn't have reminded me to sign that book, Peter." "Why ever not? Have you suddenly become bashful about your hard-earned glories?" "Because it watn's hers," said Harriet. "It was a library copy." "Stroke of luck for the ratepaers of the City of Westminster," he said, grinning.

This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, 'When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.' But the serious critique of Zuma is not about who is a barbarian and who is civilised. It is about good governance, and this is a universal value, as relevant to an African village as it is to Westminster. If you are unable to keep your appetites in check, you are inevitably going to live beyond your means. And this means you are going to become vulnerable to patronage and even corruption. That is why Jacob Zuma's 'polygamy' is his achilles heel.

Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally

London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits

In later years, Reading seems to have been regarded as a handy place to run down to, when matters were becoming unpleasant in London.  Parliament generally rushed off to Reading whenever there was a plague on at Westminster; and, in 1625, the Law followed suit, and all the courts were held at Reading.  It must have been worth while having a mere ordinary plague now and then in London to get rid of both the lawyers and the Parliament.

The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism reads, “What is the chief end of man?” The Catechism’s answer: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”[10] God graciously linked the pursuit of our chief purpose with our greatest experience of joy.

Half the country wouldn’t have died if the landlords hadn’t kept shipping away the corn, seizing cattle, rack-renting, evicting, torching cabins…Or if the government at Westminster hadn’t thought it the most prudent course of action to sit on their arses and let the Irish starve.

Upon Westminster Bridge Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!

a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

Ever heard of the Very Reverend William Buckland? No? He was a fucking brilliant Scamp! He was the Duke of Westminster and he actually ate Louis XIV’s heart 150 years after the French king died!

Some in Westminster have talked about her receiving a state funeral when she dies, which seems a bizarre sort of tribute to someone who believed the state should do as little as possible. It would be far more appropriate to allow competitive bids from private companies to run the funeral arrangements. 'And we now go over live to Westminster, where state leaders are lining up for Lady Thatcher's funeral sponsored by McDonald's. And there we see the coffin respectfully borne on the shoulders of six part-time burger-flippers dressed in the official Ronald McDonald costume, before the private cremation when the body will be flame-grilled with gherkins and a slice of cheese.' It's what she would have wanted.

The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring up the bodies.’ Deliver, that is, the accused men, by name Weston, Brereton, Smeaton and Norris, to Westminster Hall for trial. Kingston fetches them by barge; it is 12 May, a Friday.

Presently [Bridey] said: “If I was Rex”—his mind seemed full of such suppositions: “If I was Archbishop of Westminster,” “If I was head of the Great Western Railway,” “If I was an actress,” as though it were a mere trick of fate that he was none of these things, and he might awake any morning to find the matter adjusted—“if I was Rex I should want to live in my constituency.

London is not a city, London is a person. Tower Bridge talks to you; National Gallery reads a poem for you; Hyde Park dances with you; Palace of Westminster plays the piano; Big Ben and St Paul’s Cathedral sing an opera! London is not a city; it is a talented artist who is ready to contact with you directly!

But that’s the problem, you see. No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other, it will unriddle many riddles, it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now. That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unbiased Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters. When a thoughtful and unbiased Mohammedan examines the Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am spiritually insane. I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can prove anything to a lunatic--for that is part of his insanity and the evidence of it. He cannot prove to me that I am insane, for my mind has the same defect that afflicts his. All democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it; none but the republicans and mugwumps know it. All the republicans are insane, but only thee democrats and mugwumps can perceive it. The rule is perfect; in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane. When I look around me I am often troubled to see how many people are mad. This should move us to be charitable toward one anothers lunacies.

whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster.

and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past

arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of

that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been

appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the

On the Palace of Westminster: There is a sense of entitlement that pervades this place like a colourless and odourless gas, creeping along the corridors and under every door. P.10

The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front of her, the habitation of God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of God.

Una curva de la calle puso ante su vista el campanario de la catedral de Westminster, la forma fálica más descarada del horizonte londinense.

Neither knew it at the time, but a line had been crossed that could not be uncrossed- a running leap over a chasm of ignorance and misunderstanding between species and worlds...and a baby step taken into life's endless possibilities for wonder and joy and surprise that could no more be reversed than one's first taste of chocolate. A dog kiss.

appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages,

People who have much to say, a distinctive story to tell, often do not do so because they fear their words will fall on deaf ears. They feel excluded from political power and, to a large extent, from political and civic participation. Even if they were to shout their grievances from the rooftops of Westminster – or Brussels or Washington or New Delhi – they doubt it would have the slightest impact on public policy.

The pirates left the boat in the Thames, next to the Palace of Westminster. They deliberately parked across two disabled spaces, because that kind of behaviour was pretty much the whole point of being a pirate.

her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster.

Because obviously she was the most qualified for the position. At long last Edward had arrived at the enlightened state of knowing that a woman could do a job just as well as a man. Yep. That's how it happened. Edward abdicated his throne. Elizabeth would be crowned queen at Westminster Abbey that same week, and we all know she'd be the best ruler of England ever. And now history can more or less pick up along the same path where we left it.

Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism in theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith, all of which are out there and they can give their legitimate efforts to… boy the thing they had to write about was theonomy! How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he doesn’t see the problem?

Time shall show us. The post of honour and the post of shame, the general's station and the drummer's, a peer's statue in Westminster Abbey and a seaman's hammock in the bosom of the deep, the mitre and the workhouse, the woolsack and the gallows, the throne and the guillotine - the travellers to all are on the great high road; but it has wonderful divergences, and only Time shall show us whither each traveller is bound.

Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past. Oranges and lemons rang the chimes of St Clement’s, and Westminster’s division bell was dumb.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs

Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! - Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

In the year 1257, an elephant died in the Tower menagerie and was buried in a pit near the chapel. But the following year he was dug up and his remains sent to Westminster Abbey. Now, what did they want at Westminster Abbey, with the remains of an elephant? If not to carve a ton of relics out of him, and make his animal bones into the bones of saints?

[Bus ride through The Strand]: A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind) blew a thin black veil over the sun and over the Strand. The faces faded; the omnibuses suddenly lost their glow. For although the clouds were of mountainous white so that one could fancy hacking hard chips off with a hatchet, with broad golden slopes, lawns of celestial pleasure gardens, on their flanks, and had all the appearance of settled habitations assembled for the conference of gods above the world, there was a perpetual movement among them. Signs were interchanged, when, as if to fulfil some scheme arranged already, now a summit dwindled, now a whole block of pyramidal size which had kept its station inalterably advanced into the midst or gravely led the procession to fresh anchorage. Fixed though they seemed at their posts, at rest in perfect unanimity, nothing could be fresher, freer, more sensitive superficially than the snow-white or gold-kindled surface; to change, to go, to dismantle the solemn assemblage was immediately possible; and in spite of the grave fixity, the accumulated robustness and solidity, now they struck light to the earth, now darkness. Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dalloway mounted the Westminster omnibus.

The two great pillars upon which the kingdom of Satan is erected, and by which it is upheld, are ignorance and error;

Anyone who subscribes to the Westminster Confession of Faith is a Christian nationalist.

George Vines felvitt a tornya tetejébe, ahol az áruló Cooke feje van kitűzve, meg Harrisoné a Westminster Hall másik oldalán. Innen jól láttam őket, és a szép londoni panorámát is.

(the grass of the park flushed and faded, lighting up the poor mothers of Westminster and their crawling babies, as if a yellow lamp were moved beneath).

Two months earlier, speaking at Westminster College in Missouri, Winston Churchill had declared that an Iron Curtain was descending across Europe.

After some time, twelve o'clock boomed from the tall tower at Westminster, and yet at each stroke of the sonorous bell the night seemed to tremble.

Westminster Bridge fell.

I have never met members of that House (of Commons) without feeling that they simply belong to a rather amusing, rowdy club in Westminster.

it can give him a handsome tomb; it can give him a place in Westminster Abbey itself, if he choose to invest it in such a purchase.

South Square, Westminster. “Ever since Saturday I’ve been tortured by the doubt whether to write, or wait for you to write to me. Darling, I never meant to interfere in

I know they'll take their knitting with them everywhere. They simply couldn't be parted from it. They will walk about Westminster Abbey and knit, I feel sure.

Deniability was next to godliness in Westminster's corridors, and godliness itself second only to an unassailable majority.

What is it to glorify God? Glorifying God consists in four things: 1. Appreciation, 2. Adoration, 3. Affection, 4. Subjection. This is the yearly rent we pay to the crown of heaven.

Westminster był kiedyś nadrzecznym bagnem. Osuszono je, zbudowano pałac i wspaniałe opactwo, zapełniono szlachetną architekturą i nienasyconą ambicją. Ale w gruncie rzeczy to nadal bagno.

What is sanctification? Sanctification is the work of God's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.

The ultimate goal of the political elite is to privatize the air. So as not to destroy their own edifice of democratic compassion they will make provisions for the sick and the poor. Air will be rationed by a privatized bureaucracy and only those who complete a series of stringent means tests will be allowed to breath freely. If this sounds like untenable dystopian sci-fi, you haven’t been paying attention. In the 17th century Dean Jonathon Swift satirically proposed that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. Many Lords in Westminster at the time took this as a sign that an Irish voice was finally speaking sense. The descendants of these Lords still stalk the corridors of power today. Never underestimate the callousness or the hereditary madness of the ruling class.

Arise for the work of humankind. Be humble. However grand you are today or may become tomorrow, you too will be forgotten. There are no places for us in the crypt of Westminster Abbey. Even if there were, with the centuries, our accomplishments would be forgotten and our names become puzzles. But our moral sentiments can live on as memes that multiply through values in the service of others. A worthy past sedimented into a better future.

Chiswell’s and Winn’s offices were in the Palace of Westminster itself, which, with its vaulted ceilings, libraries, tearooms and air of comfortable grandeur, might have been an old university college. A half-covered passageway, watched over by large stone statues of a unicorn and lion, led to an escalator to Portcullis House. This was a modern crystal palace, with a folded glass roof, triangular panes held in place by thick black struts.

I saw a man on Westminster bridge,” she yelled through chattering teeth. “He had a rope and untied the last knot, looking straight at us. You never undo the last knot of three. Weather magic,” she added, with a glance at the skeptical Mr. Jeffreys. He put his head in his hands. “A terrible thing,” continued Caroline, yelling at Mary. “At Holywell they are doing reverse spells – trying to drain the energy from that hurricane in the Atlantic.

The night,” he wrote, “was cloudless and starry, with the moon rising over Westminster. Nothing could have been more beautiful and the searchlights interlaced at certain points on the horizon, the star-like flashes in the sky where shells were bursting, the light of distant fires, all added to the scene. It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead; the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance; the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired; and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.

On Westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century.

By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour.

The problem with the so-called bloody surveillance state is that it’s hard work trying to track someone’s movements using CCTV – especially if they’re on foot. Part of the problem is that the cameras all belong to different people for different reasons. Westminster Council has a network for traffic violations, the Oxford Street Trading Association has a huge network aimed at shop-lifters and pickpockets, individual shops have their own systems, as do pubs, clubs and buses. When you walk around London it is important to remember that Big Brother may be watching you, or he could be having a piss, or reading the paper or helping redirect traffic around a car accident or maybe he’s just forgotten to turn the bloody thing on.

The authority of the Scriptures does not depend on the decision of the church or the individual to validate it. To paraphrase the Westminster Confession, we receive it as the word of God because of what it is, not because of what we make of it.

It was a great age in which to have lived. Indeed, his own life was a miracle; let him make no mistake about it; here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his house in Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this he thought.

How great would be the disgrace to such a borough as that of Westminster if it should find that it had been taken in by a false spirit of speculation and that it had surrendered itself to gambling when it had thought to do honour to honest commerce.

Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse. Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn’t you.

They started with Big Ben. It’s always got to be relayed direct from Westminster, the real thing, never from disc. That’s got to be firmly fixed in the listeners’ minds. Then, if Big Ben is silent, the public will know that the war has taken a distinctly unpleasant turn.

Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life. Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.

Unregenerate men perform many actions, good so far as their external relations to their fellow-men are concerned. But love to God is the foundation-principle upon which all moral duties rest, just as our relation to God is the fundamental relation upon which all our other relations rest.

Cities were in her bones. Her fellow passengers could complain of smuts and smells, of the incredible chaos of carriages and wagons, but Eliza enjoyed her glimpses of a Mayfair wedding, a woman hitting another woman with a broom on the Charing Cross Road and a band of Ethiopian minstrels outside Westminster.

For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty, — one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There!

A variation of Get Rich Quick schemes was robbing Peter to pay Paul, or benefiting one person at the expense of others. The origin of the phrase is open to dispute, but one account traces it to the 1500s in England, when the lands of Saint Peter’s Church at Westminster were sold to fund repairs at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London.

the fourth question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is God?” the answer read as follows: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” This statement the great Charles Hodge described as “probably the best definition of God ever penned by man.

The idea of hell disappeared from educated thought, even from pulpit homilies. Presbyterians became ashamed of the Westminster Confession, which had pledged them to belief in a God who had created billions of men and women despite his foreknowledge that, regardless of their virtues and crimes, they were predestined to everlasting hell.

But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning -- the city inhaling -- or the same thorough-fares in the evening -- the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face.

West Country novelist Thomas Hardy almost did not survive his birth in 1840 because everyone thought he was stillborn. He did not appear to be breathing and was put to one side for dead. The nurse attending the birth only by chance noticed a slight movement that showed the baby was in fact alive. He lived to be 87 and gave the world 18 novels, including some of the most widely read in English literature. When he did die, there was controversy over where he should be laid to rest. Public opinion felt him too famous to lie anywhere other than in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, the national shrine. He, however, had left clear instructions to be buried in Stinsford, near his birthplace and next to his parents, grandparents, first wife and sister. A compromise was brokered. His ashes were interred in the Abbey. His heart would be buried in his beloved home county. The plan agreed, his heart was taken to his sister’s house ready for burial. Shortly before, as it lay ready on the kitchen table, the family cat grabbed it and disappeared with it into the woods. Although, simultaneously with the national funeral in Westminster Abbey, a burial ceremony took place on 16 January 1928, at Stinsford, there is uncertainty to this day as to what was in the casket: some say it was buried empty; others that it contained the captured cat which had consumed the heart.

The South African coal miner, or the African digging for roots in the bush, or the Algerian mason working in Paris, not only have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the cathedral at Chartres: they have, once these monuments intrude on their attention, no honorable access to them. Their apprehension of this history cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history’s arrogant and unjust judgment. This is why, ultimately, all attempts at dialogue between the subdued and subduer, between those placed within history and those dispersed outside, break down.

Nature, with all her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend explains himself; the earth is explicable — from her we came, and we must return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning — the city inhaling — or the same thoroughfares in the evening — the city exhaling her exhausted air?

Sometimes the only difference between myth and truth is the spelling.

the LORD God said: 'Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil;

Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

Dickens's humanity and compassion made an extraordinary impact on Victorian England through his writings, which remain immensely popular. This bicentenary should help renew our commitment to improving the lot of the disadvantaged of our own day." - The Very Reverend Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster Abbey, on today’s 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth.

5. The reading of the Scriptures with godly fear, the sound preaching, and conscionable hearing of the Word, in obedience unto God, with understanding, faith, and reverence; singing of psalms with grace in heart; as also the due administration and worthy receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ, are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God: besides religious oaths, vows solemn fastings, and thanksgivings upon special occasions, which are, in their several times and seasons, to be used in a holy and religious manner. Another element of true worship is the "signing of psalms with grace in the heart." It will be observed that the Confession does not acknowledge the legitimacy of the use of modern hymns in the worship of God, but rather only the psalms of the Old Testament. It is not generally realized today that Presbyterian (and many other Reformed) churches originally used only the inspired psalms, hymns and songs of the biblical Psalter in divine worship, but such is the case. The Westminster Assembly not only expressed the conviction that the psalms should be sung in divine worship, but implemented it by preparing a metrical version of the Psalter for use in the churches. This is not the place to attempt a consideration of this question. But we must record our conviction that the Confession is correct at this point. It is correct, we believe, because it has never been proved that God has commanded his Church to sing the uninspired compositions of men rather than or along with the inspired songs, hymns, and psalms of the Psalter in divine worship.

Miss Patty and Miss Maria are hardly such stuff as dreams are made of," laughed Anne. "Can you fancy them `globe-trotting' -- especially in those shawls and caps?" "I suppose they'll take them off when they really begin to trot," said Priscilla, "but I know they'll take their knitting with them everywhere. They simply couldn't be parted from it. They will walk about Westminster Abbey and knit, I feel sure...

Did you ever hear what happened to Oliver Cromwell’s head? It was originally lashed to the roof of Westminster Hall as a potent warning not to mess with the government of the day, but in 1685 a violent storm blew it off its perch and a captain of the guard had it away and hid it up his chimney, where it stayed until he admitted the crime on his death bed. So can you picture the scene? Cromwell died in 1658. 27 years later this geezer nicks his head and shoves it up his chimney. He’s about to croak it, the whole family’s gathered around his death bed, everybody’s in tears and they’re all wondering if he’ll come out with any famous last words. Perhaps, “Farewell, my children, forever. I go to your father,” or maybe, “Let us pass over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” or even, “Don’t let it end like this, tell them I said something.” Not this fucking joker! No! What does he say? He says, “Here Jackie, the sausages tasted a bit off tonight. Did I ever tell you I nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head and shoved it up the chimney? It’s still there,” and he draws back the veil of his earthly life and succumbs to eternal peace. They all look at each other, “What did he fucking say?” “He said he nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head.” “What do you mean; he nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head?” “That’s what he said, don’t blame me!” “Fuck’s sake!” “Well, do you think we should look?” “Don’t talk bollocks! You honestly want to look up the chimney to see if Oliver Cromwell’s head’s up there?” “I’m just saying …..” Anyway, one of them had a look up the chimney, found the head and by 1710 it was appearing in a freak show under the banner, ‘The Monster’s Head.’ True story

Sir Peter Tapsell: ‘You cannot ask the British Prime Minister to autograph a bottle of table wine. You really cannot.’ ‘It is English,’ I bleated. ‘Non-vintage?’ ‘Er … yes.’ ‘Good God, what is the party coming to?

St. George’s Chapel is at the bottom of the hill inside the castle walls, and though it is quaint compared to Westminster Abbey, I love it—the spectacular fan vaulting in the ceiling, the surprisingly intimate chapel with its wood-carved stalls, and the graves of at least ten monarchs, including that infamous cad Henry VIII (buried with his third wife, Jane Seymour, his favorite on account of her not living long enough to irritate him).

The clean-sweeping Commissioners, who had been animated with wonderful zeal by the nature and novelty of their work, probably felt that they had been betrayed, but it may be doubted whether any one else was disconcerted by the result of the trial, unless it might be some poor innocents here and there about the country who had been induced to believe that bribery and corruption were in truth to be banished from the purlieus of Westminster

Unfortunately, Scottish anthracite burned faster as well, which made it more expensive. Expense was no problem for the king; he had good Scottish coal shipped to Westminster to warm his palaces. Emulating the king, wealthy Londoners took up the custom. The middle classes began burning coal as well. Coal allowed Londoners to keep warm and feed themselves as the city’s population increased rapidly, from roughly 200,000 in 1600 to 350,000 by 1650.

In the late 1830s the Chinese government issued a ban on drug trafficking, but British drug merchants simply ignored the law. Chinese authorities began to confiscate and destroy drug cargos. The drug cartels had close connections in Westminster and Downing Street – many MPs and Cabinet ministers in fact held stock in the drug companies – so they pressured the government to take action. In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of ‘free trade’.

the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster

7. Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of them they may be things which God commands; and of good use both to themselves and others: yet, because they proceed not from an heart purified by faith; nor are done in a right manner,according to the Word; nor to a right end, the glory of God, they are therefore sinful, and cannot please God, or make a man meet to receive grace from God: and yet, their neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing unto God.

The Limit of this obligation to obedience [to the civil government] will be found only when we are commanded to do something contrary to the to the superior authority of God (Acts iv. 19; v. 29); or when the civil government has become so radically and incurably corrupt that it has ceased to accomplish the ends for which it was established. When that point has unquestionably been reached, when all means of redress have been exhausted without avail, when there appears no prospect of securing reform in the government itself, and some good prospect of securing it by revolution, then it is the privilege and duty of a Christian people to change their government - peacefully if they may, forcibly if they must.

remained for more than forty years, until it was disinterred and returned to England to be buried with military honors at Westminster Abbey. BACK IN MANHATTAN News of Arnold’s betrayal, as well as André’s capture and execution, sent shock waves through all of the colonies, but nowhere was the impact more keenly felt than in New York City. Even Robert Townsend found himself deeply moved by the death of one of the very men on whom he had spied. “I never felt more sensibly for

Darwin was often honored in his lifetime, but never for On the Origin of Species or Descent of Man. When the Royal Society bestowed on him the prestigious Copley Medal it was for his geology, zoology, and botany, not evolutionary theories, and the Linnaean Society was similarly pleased to honor Darwin without embracing his radical notions. He was never knighted, though he was buried in Westminster Abbey—next to Newton. He died at Down in April 1882. Mendel died two years later.

I concede that in the past we imprisoned, tortured, burned and massacred hundreds of thousands of people in the name of the gentle Jesus and His love. Today we've simply changed the words. We do it in the name of peace, progress and liberty.

Sir James Fergusson MP presided over a Highway Protection League meeting at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London in 1905, where delegates were told “the reckless conduct” of some motorists amounted to “tyranny on the highways” which was “shameful.” Motorists were getting away with murder, the meeting heard: “The old legal maxim that if a man fired a gun into a street and killed a person without meaning to do so he was guilty of murder, should be applied to motor drivers who recklessly [rode] down inoffensive people.

Finally, it is wrong to say that "nothing" is more basic to the identity of the church than suffering. Nothing is more basic to the identity of the institutional church than the preaching of the gospel, the correct administration of the sacraments, and the worship of God in Spirit and in truth (Westminster Confession of Faith, 25.4). Nothing is more basic to the identity of the individual Christian than faith, hope, obedience, and love, the fruit of the Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 13:4-13; Gal. 5:22-24; 1 John 2:3; 3:10, 24; 4:7-21; 5:1-3).

4. The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.

By the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King’s College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English essayist and critic Walter Pater (1839–94). Woolf was very fond of Clara and an exchange between them later became the basis for her short story ‘Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points’ (1928). Thoby boarded at Clifton College, Bristol, Adrian was a dayboy at Westminster School, and Vanessa attended Cope’s School of Art. Thoby, and later Adrian, eventually went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and Vanessa undertook training in the visual arts (attending the Slade School of Fine Art for a while). From 1902 Virginia’s tuition in classics passed from Clara Pater to the very capable Janet Case, one of the first graduates from Girton College, Cambridge, and a committed feminist. The sisters visited Cambridge a number of times to meet Thoby, whose friends there included Clive Bell 1881–1964), Lytton Strachey (1880– 1932), Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) and Saxon Sydney-Turner.

When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall. After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers’ heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn’t watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank and clatter of shattered stained glass raining to the cathedral’s stone floor. But for the most part the music played sweetly, until it didn’t. Then there was nothing.

Yet Britain was still green in 1800, as America was still largely primeval. William Wordsworth, a poet with a private income, would have much to say in other poems about the stifling effect of industrial labor on the body and the soul, but in July 1802 he stood on London’s Westminster Bridge and found A sight . . . touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.4

Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter – the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek. All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she – shady and amorous as she was – who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits. Here,

I met my Aunt August for the first time in more than half a century at my mother's funeral. My mother was approaching eighty-six when she died, and my aunt was some eleven or twelve years younger. I had retired from the bank two years before with an adequate pension and a silver handshake. There had been a take-over by the Westminster and my branch was considered redundant. Everyone thought me lucky, but I found it difficult to occupy my time. I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. For those reasons I found myself agreeably excited by my mother's funeral.

During our glorious year of 1974–5, while I was dithering over gravitational waves, and Stephen was leading our merged group in black hole research, Stephen himself had an insight even more radical than his discovery of Hawking radiation. He gave a compelling, almost airtight proof that, when a black hole forms and then subsequently evaporates away completely by emitting radiation, the information that went into the black hole cannot come back out. Information is inevitably lost. This is radical because the laws of quantum physics insist unequivocally that information can never get totally lost. So, if Stephen was right, black holes violate a most fundamental quantum mechanical law. How could this be? The black hole’s evaporation is governed by the combined laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity—the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity; and so, Stephen reasoned, the fiery marriage of relativity and quantum physics must lead to information destruction. The great majority of theoretical physicists find this conclusion abhorrent. They are highly sceptical. And so, for forty-four years they have struggled with this so-called information-loss paradox. It is a struggle well worth the effort and anguish that have gone into it, since this paradox is a powerful key for understanding the quantum gravity laws. Stephen himself, in 2003, found a way that information might escape during the hole’s evaporation, but that did not quell theorists’ struggles. Stephen did not prove that the information escapes, so the struggle continues. In my eulogy for Stephen, at the interment of his ashes at Westminster Abbey, I memorialised that struggle with these words: “Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions. And Hawking’s questions themselves keep on giving, generating breakthroughs decades later. When ultimately we master the quantum gravity laws, and comprehend fully the birth of our universe, it may largely be by standing on the shoulders of Hawking.

Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rēkohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and here only, were those elusive phantasms, the noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!

But where are we going?" Glancing back at her,he smiled a wicked smile. "Westminster." "Westminster! Now? What about the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord? I'm the First Footer! I can't just leave." Ranulf came back in and gave her a comforting kiss on the forehead before placing a softer one on her lips. Unfortunately, that is one tradition we must break.So pack only what is necessary and don your warmest gown." Bronwyn's heart started pounding as she realized just who Ranulf intended to see and confront. "What are you planning to do to Luc?" But the question was issued to an empty corridor. Ranulf was gone, and the next time she was to see him,they would be riding out of Hunswick at a speed she wouldn't understand for another three days.

Fiori? Sì, fiori, dal momento che non si fidava del proprio gusto in fatto di gioielli; fiori a profusione, rose, orchidee, per festeggiare quello che era, chiamiamo pure le cose col loro nome, un avvenimento: quel sentimento ch’egli aveva provato per lei quando, a tavola, era corso il nome di Peter Walsh; quel sentimento del quale non parlavano mai; per anni non ne avevano parlato; cosa che, egli pensava prendendo le rose bianche e rosse (un gran fascio avvolto in carta velina), è il più grave errore che si possa commettere al mondo. Giunge il momento in cui è troppo tardi per parlarne; si è troppo timidi per farne parola, pensava Richard intascando gli spiccioli del resto; e si avviò con l’enorme mazzo stretto al petto verso Westminster, per dire chiaro e tondo a Clarissa (ne pensasse pure ciò che voleva) porgendole i fiori: Ti amo.

You didn't have to go back far to recall a culture that said: Yes, we like a drink at lunchtime. The political culture, he meant—Peter Judd was well aware that the culture in general was chucking booze down its neck like a mental hobo. But the political culture, meaning Westminster, had cleaned up its act since the millennium, a shift in which Judd himself had played no small part. A public disavowal of some of the more famous extravagances of his youth had, near as damn it, established a party line, or at least had drawn a line across which his party didnt dare tread... Once the House's reputation for being more or less sober during daylight hours had been salvaged, and his own status as architect of the "New Responsibility" (copyright, some broadsheet reptile) safely established, Judd was happy to revert to drinking at lunchtime when he felt like it.

The failure of the Crusades intensified anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Banned from owning land or joining trading companies, forced to wear special clothing, Jews were often involved in moneylending, supposedly taboo for Christians. Kings borrowed money from them, and so protected them, but whenever society was strained, by recession or plague, they were attacked. In 1144, after a boy was murdered in Norwich, England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to make Passover matzoh, unleashing the ‘blood libel’ which in various forms – but always featuring a conspiracy of Jews to harm non-Jews – reverberates down to the twenty-first century. It spread: in 1171, it hit Blois, France, where thirty-three Jews (seventeen women) were burned alive. In the failed state of England, where Henry III struggled to maintain royal power in the face of endemic noble revolt, both king and rebels borrowed from a wealthy banker, David of Oxford. After David’s death, his widow Licoricia of Winchester, the richest non-noble in England, lent to both sides, partly funding the building of Westminster Abbey. But her murder in 1277 showed the perils of being a prominent Jew. In 1290, Henry’s son Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yet in 1264 Bolesław, duke of Poland, had granted the Statute of Kalisz which gave Jews the right to trade and worship freely and banned the blood libel, legislating against Christian conspiracy theories and denunciations: ‘Accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood is expressly prohibited,’ declared the Statute. ‘If, despite this, a Jew should be accused of murdering a Christian child, such charge must be sustained by testimony of three Christians and three Jews.’ Poland would be a Jewish sanctuary for many centuries.

So Mr. Thomas Beames found when about this time he took it into his head to go walking about London. He was surprised; indeed he was shocked. Splendid buildings raised themselves in Westminster, yet just behind them were ruined sheds in which human beings lived herded together above herds of cows—“two in each seven feet of space.” He felt that he ought to tell people what he had seen. Yet how could one describe politely a bedroom in which two or three families lived above a cow-shed, when the cow-shed had no ventilation, when the cows were milked and killed and eaten under the bedroom? That was a task, as Mr. Beames found when he came to attempt it, that taxed all the resources of the English language. And yet he felt that he ought to describe what he had seen in the course of an afternoon’s walk through some of the most aristocratic parishes in London. The risk of typhus was so great.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thrombosis, something of that sort. A sort of heart in the wrong place, isn't it? Anyhow -- there it is. Everything seems obliged to go through it now; it can hold up things, stimulate things, give the world fever or pain, and yet all the same -- is it necessary, Irwell? Is it inevitable? Couldn't we function economically quite as well without it? Has the world got to carry that kind of thing for ever? "What real strength is there in a secondary system of that sort? It's secondary, it's parasitic. It's only a sort of hypertrophied, uncontrolled counting-house which has become dominant by falsifying the entries and intercepting payment. It's a growth that eats us up and rots everything like cancer. Financiers make nothing, they are not a productive department. They control nothing. They might do so, but they don't. They don't even control Westminster and Washington. They just watch things in order to make speculative anticipations. They've got minds that lie in wait like spiders, until the fly flies wrong. Then comes the debt entanglement. Which you can break, like the cobweb it is, if only you insist on playing the wasp. I ask you again what real strength has Finance if you tackle Finance? You can tax it, regulate its operations, print money over it without limit, cancel its claims. You can make moratoriums and jubilees. The little chaps will dodge and cheat and run about, but they won't fight. It is an artificial system upheld by the law and those who make the laws. It's an aristocracy of pickpocket area-sneaks. The Money Power isn't a Power. It's respectable as long as you respect it, and not a moment longer. If it struggles you can strangle it if you have the grip...You and I worked that out long ago, Chiffan... "When we're through with our revolution, there will be no money in the world but pay. Obviously. We'll pay the young to learn, the grown-ups to function, everybody for holidays, and the old to make remarks, and we'll have a deuce of a lot to pay them with. We'll own every real thing; we, the common men. We'll have the whole of the human output in the market. Earn what you will and buy what you like, we'll say, but don't try to use money to get power over your fellow-creatures. No squeeze. The better the economic machine, the less finance it will need. Profit and interest are nasty ideas, artificial ideas, perversions, all mixed up with betting and playing games for money. We'll clean all that up..." "It's been going on a long time," said Irwell. "All the more reason for a change," said Rud.

Sixty years ago, Austin Ranney, an eminent political scientist, wrote a prophetic dissent to a famous report by an American Political Science Association committee entitled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.”4 The report, by prominent political scientists frustrated with the role of conservative Southern Democrats in blocking civil rights and other social policy, issued a clarion call for more ideologically coherent, internally unified, and adversarial parties in the fashion of a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy like Britain or Canada. Ranney powerfully argued that such parties would be a disaster within the American constitutional system, given our separation of powers, separately elected institutions, and constraints on majority rule that favor cross-party coalitions and compromise. Time has proven Ranney dead right—we now have the kinds of parties the report desired, and it is disastrous.

They bear down upon Westminster, the ghost-consecrated Abbey, and the history-crammed Hall, through the arches of the bridge with a rush as the tide swelters round them; the city is buried in a dusky gloom save where the lights begin to gleam and trail with lurid reflections past black velvety- looking hulls - a dusky city of golden gleams. St. Paul's looms up like an immense bowl reversed, squat, un-English, and undignified in spite of its great size; they dart within the sombre shadows of the Bridge of Sighs, and pass the Tower of London, with the rising moon making the sky behind it luminous, and the crowd of shipping in front appear like a dense forest of withered pines, and then mooring their boat at the steps beyond, with a shuddering farewell look at the eel-like shadows and the glittering lights of that writhing river, with its burthen seen and invisible, they plunge into the purlieus of Wapping. ("The Phantom Model")

London is a friend whom I can leave knowing without doubt that she will be the same to me when I return, to-morrow or forty years hence, and that, if I do not return, she will sing the same song to inheritors of my happy lot in future generations. Always, whether sleeping or waking, I shall know that in Spring the sun rides over the silver streets of Kensington, and that in the Gardens the shorn sheep find very green pasture. Always the plaited threads of traffic will wind about the reel of London; always as you up Regent Street from Pall Mall and look back, Westminster will rise with you like a dim sun over the horizon of Whitehall. That dive down Fleet Street and up to the black and white cliffs of St. Paul's will for ever bring to mind some rumour of romance. There is always a romance that we leave behind in London, and always London enlocks that flower for us, and keeps it fresh, so that when we come back we have our romance again.

When it is once admitted that a body of facts lies at the basis of the Christian religion, the efforts which past generations have made toward the classification of the facts will have to be treated with respect. In no branch of science would there be any real advance if every generation started fresh with no dependence upon what past generations have achieved. Yet in theology, vituperation of the past seems to be thought essential to progress. And upon what base slanders the vituperation is based! After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives rather a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession, for example, or to that tenderest and most theological of books, the "Pilgrim's Progress" of John Bunyan, and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a "dead orthodoxy" that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love.

A DINNER AT POPLAR WALK This is the first published work of Charles Dickens, which appeared in the Monthly Magazine in December 1833. It was later retitled Mr. Minns and His Cousin and can also be found in Sketches by Boz. However, since it is the beginning of the great writer’s oeuvre, it is presented at the very front of this collection. In reading this short story, we can at once detect the inimitable nature of Dickensian writing: varied characters, telling human and social understanding and, of course, hilarious comedy. Here is an account by Dickens, explaining how he felt when first publishing this story: “...my first copy of the Magazine in which my first effusion - dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street - appeared in all the glory of print; on which memorable occasion - how well I recollect it! - I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half-an-hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not

I have had so many Dwellings, Nat, that I know these Streets as well as a strowling Beggar: I was born in this Nest of Death and Contagion and now, as they say, I have learned to feather it. When first I was with Sir Chris. I found lodgings in Phenix Street off Hogg Lane, close by St Giles and Tottenham Fields, and then in later times I was lodged at the corner of Queen Street and Thames Street, next to the Blew Posts in Cheapside. (It is still there, said Nat stirring up from his Seat, I have passed it!) In the time before the Fire, Nat, most of the buildings in London were made of timber and plaister, and stones were so cheap that a man might have a cart-load of them for six-pence or seven-pence; but now, like the Aegyptians, we are all for Stone. (And Nat broke in, I am for Stone!) The common sort of People gawp at the prodigious Rate of Building and exclaim to each other London is now another City or that House was not there Yesterday or the Situacion of the Streets is quite Changd (I contemn them when they say such things! Nat adds). But this Capital City of the World of Affliction is still the Capitol of Darknesse, or the Dungeon of Man's Desires: still in the Centre are no proper Streets nor Houses but a Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch. (I have heard of that Gentleman, says Nat all a quiver). It is true that in what we call the Out-parts there are numberless ranges of new Buildings: in my old Black-Eagle Street, Nat, tenements have been rais'd and where my Mother and Father stared without understanding at their Destroyer (Death! he cryed) new-built Chambers swarm with life. But what a Chaos and Confusion is there: meer fields of Grass give way to crooked Passages and quiet Lanes to smoking Factors, and these new Houses, commonly built by the London workmen, are often burning and frequently tumbling down (I saw one, says he, I saw one tumbling!). Thus London grows more Monstrous, Straggling and out of all Shape: in this Hive of Noise and Ignorance, Nat, we are tyed to the World as to a sensible Carcasse and as we cross the stinking Body we call out What News? or What's a clock? And thus do I pass my Days a stranger to mankind. I'll not be a Stander-by, but you will not see me pass among them in the World. (You will disquiet your self, Master, says Nat coming towards me). And what a World is it, of Tricking and Bartering, Buying and Selling, Borrowing and Lending, Paying and Receiving; when I walk among the Piss and Sir-reverence of the Streets I hear, Money makes the old Wife trot, Money makes the Mare to go (and Nat adds, What Words won't do, Gold will). What is their God but shineing Dirt and to sing its Devotions come the Westminster-Hall-whores, the Charing-cross whores, the Whitehall whores, the Channel-row whores, the Strand whores, the Fleet Street whores, the Temple-bar whores; and they are followed in the same Catch by the Riband weavers, the Silver-lace makers, the Upholsterers, the Cabinet-makers, Watermen, Carmen, Porters, Plaisterers, Lightemen, Footmen, Shopkeepers, Journey-men... and my Voice grew faint through the Curtain of my Pain.

In 2014—one year after Dasani competed in a track competition at the Pratt Institute—Spike Lee stood onstage there during Black History Month, delivering a rant against gentrification. “Then comes motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome,” fumed Lee. “You can’t discover this! We been here.” He went on to compare Fort Greene Park to the Westminster Dog Show, “with twenty thousand dogs running around,” while lamenting how his father, a jazz musician who had purchased his home in 1968, was playing acoustic bass when his new neighbors, in 2013, called the police. “You just can’t come in where people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here?” The same forces are reshaping Bed-Stuy, the historic neighborhood where Dasani’s great-grandfather June first landed and where her teacher, Miss Hester, still lives. Around the corner from her basement rental, a trendy café now sells $4 espressos. Miss Hester resents the neighborhood’s white transplants, walking around “as if I am the outsider, and I’m like, ‘Excuse me I was born here!’ 

5. This covenant was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel: under the law it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews, all foresignifying Christ to come; which were, for that time, sufficient and efficacious, through the operation of the Spirit, to instruct and build up the elect in faith in the promised Messiah, by whom they had full remission of sins, and eternal salvation; and is called the old Testament.

Chapter 44 — The Coming Election       The very greatness of Mr Melmotte’s popularity, the extent of the admiration which was accorded by the public at large to his commercial enterprise and financial sagacity, created a peculiar bitterness in the opposition that was organized against him at Westminster. As the high mountains are intersected by deep valleys, as puritanism in one age begets infidelity in the next, as in many countries the thickness of the winter’s ice will be in proportion to the number of the summer musquitoes, so was the keenness of the hostility displayed on this occasion in proportion to the warmth of the support which was manifested. As the great man was praised, so also was he abused. As he was a demi-god to some, so was he a fiend to others. And indeed there was hardly any other way in which it was possible to carry on the contest against him. From the moment in which Mr Melmotte had declared his purpose of standing for Westminster in the Conservative interest, an attempt was made to drive him down the throats of the electors by clamorous assertions of his unprecedented commercial greatness.

There is, however, a more fundamental and interesting issue behind the apparent receding popularity of the Parliament, and that relates to the 'ownership' of the institution. Put simply, whose Parliament is it anyway? This is a serious question which grows out of the long process of Home Rule. The failure of Westminster parties to deliver devolution - and let us remember that a majority voted yes in the 1979 referendum meant that it was left to civil society to agitate for the Parliament. The twent-year campaign since 1979 was waged by a motley crew of campaigners and civil associations from trade unions to churches and women's groups, all unelected, but all donning the mantel of speaking for Scotland. Some parliamentarians like to think that as elected representatives, they alone represent the nation, but that is not how the nation sees it. Parliament became the people's forum, on loan to the political class, as long as they treated it, and them, with some respect, given the partiality of poitics in the twenty-first century. Power sharing - between government, parliament and people - is a three-way system, and not the preserve of any single agent.

Pero quería volver con algo entre las manos. ¿Flores? Sí, flores, porque no se fiaba de su gusto para el oro; cualquier tipo de flores, rosas, orquídeas, para celebrar lo que era, se viera como se viera, un acontecimiento; aquello que sintió por Clarissa cuando hablaban de Peter Walsh en el almuerzo; y es que nunca hablaban de ello, nunca, desde hacía años, habían hablado de ello; cosa que, pensó, agarrando sus rosas rojas y blancas (un ramo grande envuelto en papel de seda), es el mayor error del mundo. Llega el momento en que no se puede decir; uno es demasiado tímido para decirlo, pensó, manoseando sus seis o doce peniques sueltos en el bolsillo, emprendiendo el camino hacia Westminster con su gran ramo de rosas pegado al cuerpo, para decir sencillamente, con estas palabras (pensara lo que pensara de él), entregándole las flores: 'Te quiero.' ¿Por qué no? Realmente era un milagro, si pensábamos en la guerra y en los miles de pobres muchachos, con toda la vida por delante, enterrados a tropel, medio olvidados ya; era un milagro. Aquí estaba él caminando por Londres para ir a decirle a Clarissa, con estas palabras, que la quería. Algo que no se dice nunca, pensó. En parte, es por pereza; en parte, es por timidez.

No, I have a plan and I’m sticking to it. Quitting notwithstanding.” Helen was skeptical. “Describe your supposed plan.” I leaned back in my chair and counted off on my fingers. “First, get accepted to the California bar, check; move to LA, check; get a good job; put Emily in an excellent elementary school; get a reliable babysitter; work my ass off to pay for the school and the babysitter; get Emily into Westminster; make partner so I can afford Westminster; get Emily through middle and high school without her getting arrested, pregnant, or addicted to methamphetamines; get her into a good college; get promoted so I can afford the good college; keep working my ass off to pay for the whole four years; help her get a good job; then go out into the backyard, dig myself a big hole, and sit in it.” “Wow,” said Helen. “That’s quite a detailed plan.” “Yup. You know me, I like to achieve my goals.” “When did you come up with that plan?” “When the second line appeared on the pregnancy test.” “And you haven’t deviated from your plan for the last seventeen years?” I shook my head. “Jesus, Jess, what happened to you? When we were in college you were stubborn, sure, and yes, you liked a goal, but since when did simply sticking to a plan become the goal?

According to Tim Keller, nearly all Presbyterian Church in America presbyters subscribe to The Westminster Confession of Faith ‘with only the most minor exceptions (the only common one being with regard to the Sabbath).’ If, however, such an exception amounts to a wholesale rejection of the confessions’s approach to the Sabbath, its authors might have judged Keller a master of understatement. Were the Westminster Confession a garment, you would not want to pull this ‘minor’ thread, unless you wanted to be altogether defrocked. And perhaps the reason that some people pull at this thread is because they regard the confession as more of a straightjacket than a garment. Unbuckle the Sabbath, and you are well on your way to mastering theological escapology. If this seems overstatement to rival Keller’s understatement, let me say that biblical law, with its Sabbath, is no easily dispensable part of the Reformed doctrinal infrastructure. And what applies to the theology of the Reformed churches often applies to wider Protestant theology. Attempts at performing a precision strike on the Sabbath produce an embarrassing amount of unintended damage. Strike out the Sabbath and you also shatter the entire category of moral law and all that depends on it.

It is always a fashion to advise disputants to sit round a table and solve disputes by dialogue and discussion, and not to resort to violent confrontation and wars. Whether in national disputes or in international conflicts parties are being constantly advised to avoid wars and to negotiate, while governments continue to oppress, persecute, and even commit genocide. No doubt, it is a very salutary advice and a noble ideal, quite often well-meaning, too. Nobody fights a war for the pleasure of it. But the trouble is, it has never been pragmatic ideal, and never will be so long as governments being what they are and the tyranny of the majority and armed might being the ruling principle of democracy…The weaker is left to its own devices to shake off tyranny and oppression. If the weaker side listened to this idealistic advice and waited till the end of time for a solution to its problems there would have been no wars of independence. If the American colonies of George III’s England listened to such advice and continued to be governed by England and to pay taxes to England without representation in the Parliament at Westminster, there would have been no American War of Independence, no American Declaration of Independence, and there would be no United States of America today…” (pp.279-280)

Porque de tanto vivir en Westminster - ¿cuántos años ya?... más de veinte - sientes, aun en medio del tráfico, o al despertarte de noche, Clarissa estaba segurísima, una quietud particular, o mejor cierta solemnidad; una pausa indescriptible; un suspense (aunque eso podía ser del corazón, según decían aquejado de gripe) antes de que el Big Ben diese la hora. ¡Ahora! El reloj tronó. Primero un aviso, musical; luego la hora, irrevocable. Los círculos de plomo se disolvieron en el aire. ¡Qué locos estamos!, pensó cruzando Victoria Street. Porque sólo Dios sabe por qué nos gusta tanto, por qué lo vemos así, por qué lo inventamos, por qué construimos todo esto que nos rodea, y lo destrozamos para volverlo a crear de nuevo; pero si hasta los mismísimos mendigos, los miserables más desesperados sentados en los portales (beben su destrucción) hacen lo mismo; y eso no lo pueden solucionar las leyes del Parlamento y por una y misma razón: aman a la vida. En los ojos de la gente, en el vaivén, el caminar y la caminata; en el estruendo y el tumulto; en los coches, automóviles, omnibuses, camiones, hombres-anuncio que van y vienen de un lado a otro; en las bandas de música; organillos; en el triunfo, y en el tintineo y en el extraño canto de algún aeroplano que pasaba volando estaba lo que ella amaba: la vida; Londres; este momento de junio.

[I] Appreciation. To glorify God is to set God highest in our thoughts, and to have a venerable esteem of him... There is in God all that may draw forth both wonder and delight; there is a constellation of all beauties; he is prima causa, the original and springhead of being, who sheds a glory upon the creature. We glorify God when we are God-admirers; admire his attributes, which are the glistening beams by which the divine nature shines forth; his promises which are the charter of free grace, and the spiritual cabinet where the pearl of price is hid; the noble effects of his power and wisdom in making the world, which is called 'the work of his fingers.' Psa 8:3. To glorify God is to have God-admiring thoughts; to esteem him most excellent, and search for diamonds in this rock only.

Others have suggested that the disciples deliberately lied, thus spreading the story that Jesus had risen from the dead in order to keep their movement going. But this becomes preposterous when we remember that the disciples were willing to die rather than to deny that Jesus rose from the dead. Some say that they just cannot believe “the story of the miracle." But the trouble is, that they must then decide what to do with the “miracle of the story." That is, they are left with the insoluble problem of how such a sober story could ever have been written. The story is either true, or else it is the product of insanity or wickedness. And, after nearly two thousand years, no one has been able to show that it comes from either insane or wicked men. No satisfactory explanation has come forth except to believe that it actually did happen.

You,” she said, bending an icy eye on Elizabeth, “come with me. You have much to explain, madam, and you can do it while Faulkner attends to your appearance.” “I am not,” Elizabeth said in a burst of frustrated anger, “going to think of my appearance at a time like this.” The duchess’s brows shot into her hairline. “Have you come to persuade them that your husband is innocent?” “Well, of course I have. I-“ “Then don’t shame him more than you already have! You look like a refugee from a dustbin in Bedlam. You’ll be lucky if they don’t hang you for putting them to all this trouble!” She started up the staircase with Elizabeth following slowly behind, listening to her tirade with only half her mind. “Now, if your misbegotten brother would do us the honor of showing himself, your husband might not have to spend the night in a dungeon, which is exactly where Jordan thinks he’s going to land if the prosecutors have their way.” Elizabeth stopped on the third step. “Will you please listen to me for a moment-“ she began angrily. “I’ll listen to you all the way to Westminster,” the dowager snapped back sarcastically. “I daresay all London will be eager to hear what you have to say for yourself in tomorrow’s paper!” “For the love of God!” Elizabeth cried at her back, wondering madly to whom she could turn for speedier help. An hour was an eternity! “I have not come merely to show that I’m alive. I can prove that Robert is alive and that he came to no harm at Ian’s hands, and-“ The duchess lurched around and started down the staircase, her gaze searching Elizabeth’s face with a mixture of desperation and hope. “Faulkner!” she barked without turning, “bring whatever you need. You can attend Lady Thornton in the coach!

NOBEL PRIZE–WINNER, British poet laureate, essayist, novelist, journalist, and short story writer Rudyard Kipling wrote for both children and adults, with many of his stories and poems focusing on British imperialism in India. His works were popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though many deemed his political views too conservative. Born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, Kipling had a happy early childhood, but in 1871 he and his sister were sent to a boarding house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, where he spent many disappointing years. He was accepted in 1877 to United Services College in the west of England. In 1882, he returned to his family in India, working as a journalist, associate editor, and correspondent for many publications, including Civil and Military Gazette, a publication in Lahore, Pakistan. He also wrote poetry. He found great success in writing after his 1889 return to England, where he was eventually appointed poet laureate. Some of his most famous writings, including The Jungle Book, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, saw publication in the 1890s and 1900s. It was during this period that he married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend and publishing colleague. The couple settled in Vermont, where their two daughters were born. After a quarrel with his brother-in-law and grumblings from his American neighbors about his controversial political views, Kipling and his family returned to England. There, Caroline gave birth to a son in 1896. Tragically, their eldest daughter died in 1899. Later, Kipling’s son perished in battle during World War I. In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died on January 18, 1936, and his ashes are buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

saw nothing finer or more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave. That illustrious place of pilgrimage lies out of the way, alone in the middle of the woods. A narrow footpath leads to the mound, nothing but a rectangle of soil raised above ground level, with no one guarding or keeping watch on it, only two huge trees casting their shade. Leo Tolstoy planted those trees himself, so his granddaughter told me beside his grave. When he and his brother Nikolai were boys, they had heard one of the village women say that a place where you planted trees would be a happy one. So they planted two saplings, partly as a kind of game. Only later did the old man remember that promise of happiness, and then he expressed a wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. And his wish was carried out. In its heart-rending simplicity, his grave is the most impressive place of burial in the world. Just a small rectangular mound in the woods with trees overhead, no cross, no tombstone, no inscription. The great man who suffered more than anyone from his own famous name and reputation lies buried there, nameless, like a vagabond who happened to be found nearby or an unknown soldier. No one is forbidden to visit his last resting place; the flimsy wooden fence around it is not kept locked. Nothing guards that restless man’s final rest but human respect for him. While curious sightseers usually throng around the magnificence of a tomb, the compelling simplicity of this place banishes any desire to gape. The wind rushes like the word of God over the nameless grave, and no other voice is heard. You could pass the place without knowing any more than that someone is buried here, a Russian lying in Russian earth. Napoleon’s tomb beneath the marble dome of Les Invalides, Goethe’s in the grand-ducal vault at Weimar, the tombs in Westminster Abbey are none of them as moving as this silent and movingly anonymous grave somewhere in the woods, with only the wind whispering around it, uttering no word or message of its own.

This new surge in morale had nothing to do with Churchill’s speech and everything to do with his gift for understanding how simple gestures could generate huge effects. What had infuriated Londoners was that during these night raids the Luftwaffe seemed free to come and go as it wished, without interference from the night-blind RAF and the city’s strangely quiescent anti-aircraft guns. Gun crews were under orders to conserve ammunition and fire only when aircraft were sighted overhead and, as a consequence, did little firing at all. On Churchill’s orders, more guns were brought to the city, boosting the total to nearly two hundred, from ninety-two. More importantly, Churchill now directed their crews to fire with abandon, despite his knowing full well that guns only rarely brought down aircraft. The orders took effect that Wednesday night, September 11. The impact on civic morale was striking and immediate. Crews blasted away; one official described it as “largely wild and uncontrolled shooting.” Searchlights swept the sky. Shells burst over Trafalgar Square and Westminster like fireworks, sending a steady rain of shrapnel onto the streets below, much to the delight of London’s residents. The guns raised “a momentous sound that sent a chattering, smashing, blinding thrill through the London heart,” wrote novelist William Sansom. Churchill himself loved the sound of the guns; instead of seeking shelter, he would race to the nearest gun emplacement and watch. The new cacophony had “an immense effect on people’s morale,” wrote private secretary John Martin. “Tails are up and, after the fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning—cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology—the relief of hitting back.” The next day’s Home Intelligence reports confirmed the effect. “The dominating topic of conversation today is the anti-aircraft barrage of last night. This greatly stimulated morale: in public shelters people cheered and conversation shows that the noise brought a shock of positive pleasure.

The appeasers had been powerful; they had controlled The Times and The BBC; they had been largely drawn from the upper classes, and their betrayal of England's greatness would be neither forgotten nor forgiven by those who, gulled by the mystique of England's class system, had believed as Englishmen had believed for generations that public school boys governed best. The appeasers destroyed oligarchic rule which, though levelers may protest, had long governed well. If ever men betrayed their class, these were they. Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, Anti-Semitism, the Reich's darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold all that had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.

However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.

The most poignant lesson, which proved to be the last, was held a few days before the wedding. Diana’s thoughts were on the profound changes ahead. Miss Snipp noted: “Lady Diana rather tired--too many late nights. I delivered silver salt-cellars--present from West Heath school--very beautiful and much admired. Lady Diana counting how many days of freedom are left to her. Rather sad. Masses of people outside of Palace. We hope to resume lessons in October. Lady Diana said: “In 12 days time I shall no longer be me.’” Even as she spoke those words Diana must have known that she had left behind her bachelor persona as soon as she had entered the Palace portals. In the weeks following the engagement she had grown in confidence and self-assurance, her sense of humour frequently bubbling to the surface. Lucinda Craig Harvey saw her former cleaning lady on several occasions during her engagement, once at the 30th birthday party of her brother-in-law, Neil McCorquodale. “She had a distance to her and everyone was in awe of her,” she recalls. It was a quality also noticed by James Gilbey. “She has always been seen as a typical Sloane Ranger. That’s not true. She was always removed, always had a determination about her and was very matter-of-fact, almost dogmatic. That quality has now developed into a tremendous presence.” While she was in awe of Prince Charles, deferring to his every decision, she didn’t appear to be overcome by her surroundings. Inwardly she may have been nervous, outwardly she appeared calm, relaxed and ready to have fun. At Prince Andrew’s 21st birthday party which was held at Windsor Castle she was at her ease among friends. When her future brother-in-law asked where he could find the Duchess of Westminster, the wife of Britain’s richest aristocrat, she joked: “Oh Andrew, do stop name dropping.” Her ready repartee, cutting but not vicious, was reminiscent of her eldest sister Sarah when she was the queen bee of the Society circuit. “Don’t look so serious it’s not working,” joked Diana as she introduced Adam Russell to the Queen, Prince Charles and other members of the royal family in the receiving line at the ball held at Buckingham Palace two days before her wedding. Once again she seemed good humoured and relaxed in her grand surroundings. There wasn’t the slightest sign that a few hours earlier she had collapsed in paroxysms of tears and seriously considered calling the whole thing off.

He crossed to the desk and took from a drawer a small package wrapped in black velvet. When he unfolded the cloth, Lyra saw something like a large watch or a small clock: a thick disc of brass and crystal. It might have been a compass or something of the sort. “What is it?” she said. “It’s an alethiometer. It’s one of only six that were ever made. Lyra, I urge you again: keep it private. It would be better if Mrs Coulter didn’t know about it. Your uncle –” “But what does it do?” “It tells you the truth. As for how to read it, you’ll have to learn by yourself. Now go – it’s getting lighter – hurry back to your room before anyone sees you.” He folded the velvet over the instrument and thrust it into her hands. It was surprisingly heavy. Then he put his own hands on either side of her head and held her gently for a moment. She tried to look up at him, and said, “What were you going to say about Uncle Asriel?” “Your uncle presented it to Jordan College some years ago. He might –” Before he could finish, there came a soft urgent knock on the door. She could feel his hands give an involuntary tremor. “Quick now, child,” he said quietly. “The powers of this world are very strong. Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current. Go well, Lyra; bless you, child; bless you. Keep your own counsel.” “Thank you, Master,” she said dutifully. Clutching the bundle to her breast, she left the study by the garden door, looking back briefly once to see the Master’s dæmon watching her from the windowsill. The sky was lighter already; there was a faint fresh stir in the air. “What’s that you’ve got?” said Mrs Lonsdale, closing the battered little suitcase with a snap. “The Master gave it me. Can’t it go in the suitcase?” “Too late. I’m not opening it now. It’ll have to go in your coat pocket, whatever it is. Hurry on down to the Buttery; don’t keep them waiting . . .” It was only after she’d said goodbye to the few servants who were up, and to Mrs Lonsdale, that she remembered Roger; and then she felt guilty for not having thought of him once since meeting Mrs Coulter. How quickly it had all happened! And now she was on her way to London: sitting next to the window in a zeppelin, no less, with Pantalaimon’s sharp little ermine-paws digging into her thigh while his front paws rested against the glass he gazed through. On Lyra’s other side Mrs Coulter sat working through some papers, but she soon put them away and talked. Such brilliant talk! Lyra was intoxicated; not about the North this time, but about London, and the restaurants and ballrooms, the soirées at Embassies or Ministries, the intrigues between White Hall and Westminster. Lyra was almost more fascinated by this than by the changing landscape below the airship. What Mrs Coulter was saying seemed to be accompanied by a scent of grown-upness, something disturbing but enticing at the same time: it was the smell of glamour.

LEAD PEOPLE TO COMMITMENT We have seen that nonbelievers in worship actually “close with Christ” in two basic ways: some may come to Christ during the service itself (1 Cor 14:24 – 25), while others must be “followed up with” by means of after-service meetings. Let’s take a closer look at both ways of leading people to commitment. It is possible to lead people to a commitment to Christ during the service. One way of inviting people to receive Christ is to make a verbal invitation as the Lord’s Supper is being distributed. At our church, we say it this way: “If you are not in a saving relationship with God through Christ today, do not take the bread and the cup, but as they come around, take Christ. Receive him in your heart as those around you receive the food. Then immediately afterward, come up and tell an officer or a pastor about what you’ve done so we can get you ready to receive the Supper the next time as a child of God.” Another way to invite commitment during the service is to give people a time of silence or a period of musical interlude after the sermon. This affords people time to think and process what they have heard and to offer themselves to God in prayer. In many situations, it is best to invite people to commitment through after-meetings. Acts 2 gives an example. Inverses 12 and 13 we are told that some folks mocked after hearing the apostles praise and preach, but others were disturbed and asked, “What does this mean?” Then, we see that Peter very specifically explained the gospel and, in response to the follow-up question “What shall we do?” (v. 37), he explained how to become a Christian. Historically, many preachers have found it effective to offer such meetings to nonbelievers and seekers immediately after evangelistic worship. Convicted seekers have just come from being in the presence of God and are often the most teachable and open at this time. To seek to “get them into a small group” or even to merely return next Sunday is asking a lot. They may also be “amazed and perplexed” (Acts 2:12), and it is best to strike while the iron is hot. This should not be understood as doubting that God is infallibly drawing people to himself (Acts 13:48; 16:14). Knowing the sovereignty of God helps us to relax as we do evangelism, knowing that conversions are not dependent on our eloquence. But it should not lead us to ignore or minimize the truth that God works through secondary causes. The Westminster Confession (5.2 – 3), for example, tells us that God routinely works through normal social and psychological processes. Therefore, inviting people into a follow-up meeting immediately after the worship service can often be more conducive to conserving the fruit of the Word. After-meetings may take the shape of one or more persons waiting at the front of the auditorium to pray with and talk with seekers who wish to make inquiries right on the spot. Another way is to host a simple Q&A session with the preacher in or near the main auditorium, following the postlude. Or offer one or two classes or small group experiences targeted to specific questions non-Christians ask about the content, relevance, and credibility of the Christian faith. Skilled lay evangelists should be present who can come alongside newcomers, answer spiritual questions, and provide guidance for their next steps.

The revolt Samuel Sharpe had started on a Caribbean island was building to a culmination at Westminster – a final drive to asphyxiate slavery throughout the British Empire. But it came not through a spectacular legislative duel or an inspiring floor speech, but rather through the grind of parliamentary process and the unromantic reality of dickering in the shadows.

Livingstone’s tomb in Westminster Abbey was inscribed with a quotation from an unsent letter that he had written to New York Herald publisher Gordon Bennett in April 1872, which ended with the words “All I can add in my loneliness is, may Heaven’s richest blessing come down on everyone—American, English, or Turk—who will help heal the open sore of the world.

Give in to the wars waging without and miss the abundance of peace available within. Being safe and secure as defined by the world isn’t God’s highest aim. The Westminster Catechism states that man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

For many of us, these are comparatively unfamiliar themes. They were not always so to the people of God. There was a time when the subject of God’s attributes (as it was called) was thought so important as to be included in the catechism which all children in the churches were taught and all adult members were expected to know. Thus, to the fourth question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is God?” the answer read as follows: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” This statement the great Charles Hodge described as “probably the best definition of God ever penned by man.

...that famous motto that sits above Christopher Wren's tomb at Westminster Abbey... "If you seek his monument, look around you" - meaning London, 17th Century London. I think it's a motto that very much applies to the Scottish contribution to the modern World: that if you seek their monument, the Scots' monument, look around you.

While directing choirs at Westminster Choir College in New Jersey, Stough began training his singers to exhale properly, to build up their respiratory muscles and enlarge their lungs.

That God is simple means, to use the words of the of the Westminster Confession of Faith, that He is ‘without … parts.’ He is not a composite or compound being, but a simple one.5 He is not made up of parts. You are not simple. You were, as the psalmist says, ‘knitted … together in your mother’s womb.’ You have a maker who formed your ‘inward parts,’ joined them together, and gave you life (Ps. 139:13). Your existence depends on the one who made you and on the parts He formed and joined together. Everything God created is made of parts—parts that are held together by His sustaining power. Nothing in creation is simple. But God is not like you or anything else. He has no maker. His attributes are not knitted together to form His being. He is not ‘made up’ of His attributes, nor are His attributes added on to His being or essence to make Him what He is. No, He is identical to His attributes. He is simple.

Libraries, railway stations and three Scottish castles were burned. A bomb exploded in Westminster Abbey, damaging a stained-glass window.[8] There were over 200 acts of damage against property in the space of four years. The suffrage campaign of assault on art was driven by moral anger and self-righteousness. It was part cultural terrorism, part publicity campaign and part blackmail.

Bone beds turn up sporadically elsewhere, with spectacular examples in the Dinosaur National Monument in the USA and in Mongolia’s Gobi desert. In eastern England there are several within the early Cretaceous strata, which include, as well as bones, structures termed coprolites, some of which represent the petrified faeces of dinosaurs or marine reptiles. In the middle of the 19th century, when England’s population was booming and the farmers were struggling to feed everybody, it was discovered that these fragments (which, being bone, are phosphate-rich) made a superb fertilizer when crushed and acid-treated. A thriving and highly profitable industry formed to quarry away these ‘coprolite beds’. Some considerable figures were involved in this industry. John Henslow, Charles Darwin’s beloved mentor of his time at Cambridge, seems to have first encouraged the farmers of eastern England to use such fossil manure. William Buckland also became involved. An extraordinary combination of early savant of geology at Oxford and Dean of Westminster, he was the first to scientifically describe a dinosaur ( Megalosaurus); carried out his fieldwork in academic gown; reputedly ate his way through the entire animal kingdom; and coined the term ‘coprolite’, using these petrified droppings to help reconstruct the ecology of ancient animals. Later, he energetically collaborated with the celebrated German chemist Justus Liebig (who had worked out how to chemically treat these fossil phosphates to make fertilizer) to show how they could be used by agriculturalists, once demonstrating their efficacy by exhibiting, in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, a turnip, a yard in circumference, that he had grown with such prehistoric assistance. It is related strata (geologically rare phosphate-rich deposits, usually biologically formed) that are still a mainstay—if a rapidly depleting one—of modern agriculture. In a very real sense, these particular rocks are keeping us all alive.

In 1980, one hundred years after her death, George Eliot was finally admitted to Westminster Abbey. A stone was laid for her in Poets’ Corner, squeezed between memorials to Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden. Here she is remembered as Mary Ann Evans, as well as George Eliot — a choice of names that represents a greater portion of her sixty-one years while setting aside both her marriages

Давайте посмотрим, как сложилась жизнь Иоанниса (Джона) и Георгиоса (Джорджа), братьев-близнецов, которые родились на Кипре и проживают ныне в Большом Лондоне. Джон четверть века трудится в отделе кадров крупного банка и занимается перестановкой работников из одного уголка планеты в другой. Джордж – водитель такси. Доход Джона абсолютно стабилен (ну или он так думает); Джон получает также премии, четыре недели отпуска раз в год и золотые наручные часы каждые двадцать пять лет службы. Ежемесячно на счёт Джона в банке National Westminster переводят 3082 фунта стерлингов. Часть этих денег он тратит на погашение кредита за дом в западном предместье Лондона, часть – на коммунальные услуги и сыр фета, кое-что откладывает. Утром в субботу, когда все потягиваются и нежатся в постели, Джон обычно просыпался с безмятежной улыбкой и с мыслью «жизнь хороша» – до банковского кризиса, с наступлением которого он осознал, что его должность могут и сократить. Безработица ударила бы по нему очень сильно. Будучи специалистом по персоналу, он видел, как в одночасье обрывается длинная карьера; тот, кого уволили в возрасте за пятьдесят, не оправится от удара уже никогда. Джордж живет на одной улице с братом и водит чёрное такси – это говорит о том, что он целых три года развивал лобные доли мозга, запоминая географию и маршруты Большого Лондона, получил лицензию и теперь имеет право брать клиентов на улицах. Бывают удачные дни, когда Джордж зарабатывает сотни фунтов; бывают дни похуже, когда не отбиваются даже расходы; но в среднем таксист уже многие годы зарабатывает столько же, сколько и его брат, банковский служащий. На сегодня он может вспомнить единственный день за 25 лет, когда не взял ни одного пассажира. Из-за нестабильности дохода Джордж часто ноет, что у него, в отличие от брата, нет гарантированного рабочего места, – но на деле это иллюзия, так как у Джорджа имеется нечто большее.

That beautiful faith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry air of John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which had redeemed even the injustices of Macaulay—all that seemed slowly and sadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good in the Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that was bad in it abode and clung like clay. The magnificent emancipation evaporated; the mean calculation remained. One could still calculate in clear statistical tables, how many men lived, how many men died. One must not ask how they lived; for that is politics. One must not ask how they died; for that is religion. And religion and politics were ruled out of all the Later Victorian debating clubs; even including the debating club at Westminster. What third thing they were discussing, which was neither religion nor politics, I do not know. I have tried the experiment of reading solidly through a vast number of their records and reviews and discussions; and still I do not know. The only third thing I can think of to balance religion and politics is art; and no one well acquainted with the debates at St. Stephen's will imagine that the art of extreme eloquence was the cause of the confusion. None will maintain that our political masters are removed from us by an infinite artistic superiority in the choice of words. The politicians know nothing of politics, which is their own affair: they know nothing of religion, which is certainly not their affair: it may legitimately be said that they have to do with nothing; they have reached that low and last level where a man knows as little about his own claim, as he does about his enemies'. In any case there can be no doubt about the effect of this particular situation on the problem of ethics and science. The duty of dragging truth out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner one can possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in itself, had somehow come into collision with the older and larger duty of knowing something about the organism and ends of a creature; or, in the everyday phrase, being able to make head or tail of it. This paradox pursued and tormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanity repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what people come by it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes the telephone, according to what words one hears in it. They really seem to have felt that the train could be a substitute for its own passengers; or the telephone a substitute for its own voice.

Mattie thought for a moment and then said suddenly, “I can go to the Quakers for a week. I help out there sometimes as a translator and they would find me somewhere to stay.” Tollman looked interested. “What’s this Quakers’ place then?” “St Stephen’s House, in Westminster, next to Scotland Yard. I’m surprised you don’t know it. They run an emergency service there for Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in distress.” Mattie explained.

This is the class – people of some consideration in the neighbourhood, with leisure to go to the sheriff’s court and thereafter to Westminster. Out of this process in time the Pyms and Hampdens arose.

If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse. Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn’t you.

should have been laid by "Superstition." These Puritans came forward with Calvinistic incredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms, Westminster Confessions; demanding, chiefly of all, that they should have liberty to worship in their own way. Liberty to tax themselves: that was the thing they should have demanded! It was Superstition, Fanaticism, disgraceful ignorance of Constitutional Philosophy to insist on the other thing!—Liberty to tax oneself? Not to pay out money from your pocket except on reason shown? No century, I think, but a rather barren one would have fixed on that as the first right of man! I should say, on the contrary, A just man will generally have better cause than money in what shape soever, before deciding to revolt against his Government.

The fundamental principle of society is that of individual self-preservation and self-realization. There will be no perfected society that is not made up of perfected individuals. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. A castle is as strong as its least-guarded door. If in society there are links that are weak, society is weak. If in the great household of men there are individuals that are imperfect, then the household of men remains imperfect. Perfect units are needed for the perfect unity. Therefore, the ultimate purpose of individuality is not individuality, but the realization of the commonwealth. The ultimate reason why every man must be perfect is not that the man should be perfect, but that the community should be perfect. Therefore, every individual must aim at high things, noble things, and desire honor. This is ambition in its simplest, purest form; and this is not evil, but wholly good.

The first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism is “What is the chief end of man?” What is the final purpose? What is the main thing about us? Where are we going, and what will we do when we get there? The answer is “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.

The Scots were unconquerable foes. It was not until 1305 that Wallace was captured, tried with full ceremonial in Westminster Hall, and hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. But the Scottish war was one in which, as a chronicler said, “every winter undid every summer’s work”. Wallace was to pass the torch to Robert Bruce.

Henry treated his ungrateful children with generosity, but he had no illusions. The royal chamber at Westminster at this time was adorned with paintings done at the King’s command. One represented four eaglets preying upon the parent bird, the fourth one poised at the parent’s neck, ready to pick out the eyes. “The four eaglets,” the King is reported to have said, “are my four sons, who cease not to persecute me even unto death. The youngest of them, whom I now embrace with so much affection, will some time in the end insult me more grievously and more dangerously than any of the others.

Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

First, not all the proponents of limited election seem to regard these texts as particularly important. Louis Berkhof, for example, managed to write an entire systematic theology without citing either of the texts in question;129 and though John Calvin did comment upon them briefly in his commentary on 1 John, he evidently did not regard them as important enough even to mention in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. When one thinks about it, this is truly astonishing. Calvin’s Institutes is a monumental work of over 1500 pages; in it he sought to provide an exhaustive summary of Christian doctrine, as he understood it, along with the biblical support for it. In the Westminster Press edition, the index of Bible references alone is thirty-nine pages of small print with three columns per page. And yet, in this entire work, as massive and thorough as it is, Calvin never once found the Johannine declaration that God is love important enough to discuss.

Westminster Hall raises its immense dignity as we pass out. Little men and women are moving soundlessly about the floor. They appear minute, perhaps pitiable; but also venerable and beautiful under the curve of the vast dome, under the perspective of the huge columns. One would rather like to be small nameless animal in a vast cathedral. Let us rebuild the world then as a splendid hall; let us give up making statues and inscribing them with impossible virtues.

My gaze roams over the Gothic ceiling as I walk. This place looks like a grandiose version of Oxford or Westminster, with soaring arches and ornate carvings from centuries ago. It’s like a medieval monastery on a scale fit for gods.

Everyone has something missing or something broken or something not quite fulfilled in their own life—but if they were to find the right dog, a dog that’s alone and similarly incomplete, then together, as a unit, they would be made whole. —Hrishikesh Hirway

we can do about getting you bailed … blah, blah, blah … But before we get into all that just explain one thing for me, yeah?’ As he pauses, my brow furrows in anticipation. ‘You’re my brief, innit?’ ‘I am indeed your legal representative.’ ‘And that means I can ask you anything I like, yeah?’ My brow furrows further. Soon my entire upper face will be one huge wrinkle. ‘Is there some specific aspect of your case you’d like to talk about, Mr Nazeeb?’ ‘Not about my case, about you, blood. No offence but … how comes you, a black geezer, talks like a posh white geezer? Is your mum the queen or something?’ He laughs heartily as though this is the funniest joke he’s ever heard. ‘Dude, you don’t sound nuthin’ like any of the black geezers from round my ends and it’s proper doing my head in. What’s your story?’ One might assume that given Mr Nazeeb is being held in custody for attacking a rival drug dealer with a baseball bat, is looking at a five-year sentence, has already had an appeal for bail turned down and is facing a second in just twenty-five minutes, he would be a tad more focused on his current situation. But to make such an assumption about the twenty-seven-year-old Asian man sitting across the table from me (dressed head to toe in his drug-dealing street uniform of baseball cap, black North Face jacket, grey sweatshirt, matching jogging bottoms and bright white box-fresh trainers), one would need to be ignorant of a truth of which I have long been painfully aware: that little frustrates the human brain so much as an inability to immediately pigeonhole complete strangers. And for the man sitting across from me in a dingy conference room at Westminster Magistrates Court the question of why I, as a thirty-four-year-old criminal barrister with light-brown skin, Caribbean heritage and a three-piece pinstripe suit, don’t drop my aitches is, it would appear, of greater priority than even personal liberty. It is a phenomenon unbounded not only by race but

In 1912 Henry had summed up the situation in the last article he wrote while working for the Limerick Leader: “Ireland has no strong voice to demand justice for her people in Westminster or anywhere else. Frustrated on every level, the ordinary Irish man and woman feels the pressure mounting inexorably. Living

כִּ֤י ׀ לֹֽא־ תִהְיֶ֣ה אַחֲרִ֣ית לָרָ֑ע נֵ֖ר רְשָׁעִ֣ים יִדְעָֽךְ׃

Anyone who conforms to the Westminster Confession of Faith is a Christian Nationalist.

The narrow hips mean there’s not much room for puppies. So a normal litter is three puppies, compared with six for a beagle or seven for a corgi or eight for a Great Dane. The big heads and wide shoulders mean that puppies often won’t fit through the birth canal. About 80 percent of all Frenchies are born via C-section. That limits the number of litters before the mother wears out.

Eventually, his own work attracted wide attention, and he said of his work, “If I have seen a little farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” The bones of that man lie buried now, in Westminster Abbey, under an unusual inscription: “Here lie the remains of all that was mortal in Sir Isaac Newton.

duties required by this Commandment we cannot do better than to quote the Westminster Confession of Faith. They are "the knowing and acknowledging of God to be the only true God, and our God (1 Chronicles 28:9; Dent. 26:17, etc.); and to worship and glorify Him accordingly (Psalm 95:6, Verse 7; Matthew 4:10, etc.),by thinking (Malachi 3:16), meditating (Psalm 63:6), remembering (Ecclesiastes 12:1), highly esteeming (Psalm 71:19), honoring (Malachi 1:6), adoring (Isaiah 45:23), choosing (Joshua 24:15), loving (Deuteronomy 6:5), desiring (Psalm 73:25), fearing of Him (Isaiah 8:13), believing Him (Exodus 14:3 1), trusting (Isaiah 26:4), hoping (Psalm 103:7), delighting (Psalm 37:4), rejoicing in Him (Psalm 32:11), being zealous for Him (Romans 12:11), calling upon him, giving all praise and thanks (Philippians 4:6), and yielding all obedience and submission to Him with the whole man (Jeremiah 7:23), being careful in all things to please Him (1 John 3:22), and sorrowful when in anything he is offended (Jeremiah 31:18; Psalm

In 1647 the "Westminster Standards" were received by the Church of Scotland as a part of the uniformity of religion to which the three kingdoms had become bound in the Solemn League.

Buda, perched on steep hills, her sprawling Royal Palace, and her Citadel carved into jagged cliffs which plunge into the river, craves the attention of the visitor arriving down the Danube from Vienna. Pest, on the flat plain that is the continuation of the Puszta, is all business, commerce and intellect, all conversation and art. Fantastic amalgams of Romanesque, Gothic and Byzantine straining to find their Magyar soul face the boulevards, which are unabashed imitations of both Paris and Vienna. The Parliament, ostentatiously outdoing Westminster, spire for spire, Gothic arch for Gothic arch, faces the dirty, gray Danube, the heart of the city.

Cornelius Van Til, under whom Schaeffer studied at Westminster for two years, used Kuyper’s notion of the antithesis (i.e., that an absolute antithesis exists in all of life between the believer and unbeliever) to develop his presuppositional apologetics.

Creagh also blamed much of what happened in 2019 and Brexit on her former Islington comrade Jeremy Corbyn. The day after the election, she confronted Corbyn in Portcullis House in the Palace of Westminster, enraged to see him taking selfies with young supporters after she and dozens of other Labour MPs had lost their seats. ‘I don’t think Jeremy did the cause any favours, he went to EU rallies without mentioning the European Union. He was lost in his own self-righteousness. The whole kind of movement and the momentum around his own personal political project, which I think, in retrospect, is probably not the same political project of the Labour Party’s historic mission, which is to get people elected to Parliament. I think Jeremy kind of lost sight of that.

Men are to be brought to this black business hood-winked. They are to be drawn in by degrees, until they cannot retreat…we are breaking through all those sacred maxims of our forefathers, and giving the alarm to every wise man on the continent of America, that all his rights depend on the will of men whose corruptions are notorious, who regard him as an enemy, and who have no interest in his prosperity.

I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it. (Final telegram to colleague John Murray at Westminster Theological Seminary from hospital in Bismarck, North Dakota, December 29, 1936. He died January 1, 1937.)

So thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it. (Final telegram to colleague John Murray at Westminster Theological Seminary from hospital in Bismarck, North Dakota, December 29, 1936. He died January 1, 1937.)

A dog will wag and lick your face and just about knock the door down waiting for you to come in at the end of the day. But are they really thrilled? Or are they running the world’s longest con, a scheme developed over thousands of generations for better chow and a warm place to sleep?

Second, she reflects on her old desire to meet with God for a “business meeting” only to find that God had in mind a “picnic.” What a trade-off! The picnic sounds like an echo of the wondrous affirmation of the Westminster Shorter Catechism that our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.

A person will not be fully persuaded or assured that the Bible is the Word of God unless and until God the Holy Spirit does a work in his heart, which is called the internal testimony of the Spirit.

That eternity should be born; that He who thunders in the heavens should cry in the cradle; that He who rules the stars should suck the breasts; that the Prince of Life should die; that the Lord of Glory should be put to shame; that sin should be punished to the full, yet pardoned to the full; who could ever have conceived of such a mystery, had not the Scripture revealed it to us?

The Spirit’s internal testimony does not give the believer private, esoteric knowledge or information that is unavailable to anyone else.

Spirit’s work of changing the obstinate, recalcitrant hearts of sinners by inwardly changing the disposition of their souls. That is what the confession is talking about here: God melts our hearts and makes us fully persuaded and assured of Scripture’s infallible truth and divine authority.

Holy Spirit does not speak with a forked tongue. He never grants us the right to disobey what His inspired Scriptures instruct us regarding our duty. The Spirit works with and through the Word, never apart from or against it.

very heart of Christianity, is the concept of divine revelation. Christianity is a revealed religion, constructed not on the basis of speculative philosophy but in response to what God Himself has made manifest.

principle of sola Scriptura, developed by the Reformers. It acknowledges that the final authority in all matters of theology and in all controversies of faith and life is not the decrees or traditions of the church but sacred Scripture itself.