41
" The forest itself has different names in different tongues — Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it. "
― Charles Williams , The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante
49
" She said, still perplexed at a strange language: "But how can I cease to be troubled? will it leave off coming because I pretend it wants you? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street?"
"It is not," he said, "and you shall not pretend at all. The thing itself you may one day meet-never mind that now, but you'll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven't you heard it said that we ought to bear one another's burdens?"
"But that means-" she began, and stopped.
"I know," Stanhope said. "It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don't say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of. If you're still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for you--however sympathetic I may be. "
― Charles Williams , Descent into Hell
52
" Love is Holiness and Divine Indignation; the placidity of an ordinary married life is the veil of a spiritual passage into profound things. Nor is this all; the lover knows himself also to be the cross upon which the Beloved is to be stretched, and so she also of her lover. A suggestion of this — probably no more — is to be found merely in the fact of her existence the sense of being for ever intimately bound to another which when it is not repose is agony, the state of suspension upon a substance alien and unavoidable for which, though from a more dreadful distance, crucifixion is the only comparison. There is no middle state into which this issues — either it is continued into an anguish of entire repulsion and hate, or, by the grace of that Crucifixion which includes it but is so much more than it alone, it becomes itself a purgation and a redemption. This is — in its degree, and who shall say how terrific that degree may become? — the annihilation of the selfhood which the saints have sought, and the end of it is union. "
― Charles Williams , Outlines of Romantic Theology
53
" And since Love and Christ are one, and the work of redemption, formation, and union is one with his dealings with man in whatever state He is known, it may even be that the operation of this work takes place for some by means of their marriage. There are souls to whom religion is not much more than a mere formal duty, if that, who are yet capable of heroic achievements in love, of temptation and crucifixion in marriage if not in the Church. Vigil and fast, devotion and self-surrender, are aimed in the end at one sole End, and holiness may be reached by the obvious ways as well as by the more secret. The years of marriage may even have removed almost all memory of the high genesis of marriage, and the altar may be 'to an unknown God', for the name of his deity is forgotten. In the devotion of many a wife and many a husband, when the evils of the world are upon them, Christ redeems them and draws them to himself; they are upon the cross none the less because they offer it in churches but a merely casual knee. "
― Charles Williams , Outlines of Romantic Theology
58
" There is, it seems, a law in things that if a man is compelled to choose between two good actions, mutually exclusive, the one which he chooses to neglect will in course of time avenge itself on him. Rightly considered, this is a comfortable if chastening thought, for it implies that the nature of good is such that it can never, not even for some other mode of itself, be neglected. If ever it is, for whatever admirable reasons, set on one side it will certainly return. "
― Charles Williams