Elder father, though thine eyes Shine with hoary mysteries, Canst thou tell what in the heart Of a cowslip blossom lies?
Smaller than all lives that be, Secret as the deepest sea, Stands a little house of seeds Like an elfin's granary.
Speller of the stones and weeds, Skilled in Nature's crafts and creeds, Tell me what is in the heart Of the smallest of the seeds.
God Almighty, and with Him Cherubim and Seraphim Filling all Eternity-- Adonai Elohim.
The rare strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross obvious thing is to miss it. Chaos is dull; because in chaos a train might go anywhere--to Baker Street or Bagdad. But man is a magician and his whole magic is in this that he does say 'Victoria,' and lo! it is Victoria.
Men talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something specialistic and arid and academic. But philosophy and theology are not only the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of being vulgar, to the point, I was going to say, of being rowdy. They alone admit all matters: they alone lie open to all attacks.... There is no detail from buttons to kangaroos that does not enter into the gay confusion of philosophy. There is no fact of life, from the death of a donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and sing in, in the glorious carnival of theology.
The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising politician--that is to say, he was a pleasant youth with flat fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates. In public his appearances were always successful and his principle was simple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able. In private, in a club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly like a schoolboy.
The personal is not a mere figure for the impersonal: rather the impersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common personality. God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of God.
The world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds.... Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived such a thing; that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.