Home > Work > The Silent Spire Speaks

The Silent Spire Speaks QUOTES

The Silent Spire Speaks QUOTES

1 " . . . the most perfect apologia I ever heard for the cloistered contemplative life. It is contained in two brief sentences. They come from the life of my late Abbott, Dom Mary Frederic Dunne. He would as any antagonist of the contemplative life two short questions. They admitted of only one very brief answer. He would look kindly at the objectioner and ask softly: "You believe in the efficiency of prayer, don't you?" When the person made the only possible reply - an affirmative one - Dom Frederic would smile and even more quietly ask: "Then what is wrong with a whole life of prayer? "

― M. Raymond , The Silent Spire Speaks

2 " Man is only man when he thinks, He thinks when he thinks clearly, consistently, cogently, conclusively. In one word, man in man only when he's logical. The simplest logic will take any thinking man from that grass to the Creator of all grasses - God. If you had your full courses in Scholastic Philosophy, I'd make you start with that single blade you've been chewing on and have you course through Minor and Major Logic into Cosmology, Psychology, Ontology, Ethics, and Natural Theology. That would be reviewing your Philosophy. That would be thinking like a man. That would be philosophizing in the truest sense of the word; for it would be going to the ultimate causes in order to know that grass really is. "

― M. Raymond , The Silent Spire Speaks

3 " I reached that point in my musings when it suddenly struck me that the present-day Communists were worse than Nietzsche. He claimed God was dead - intimating, at least, that He had lived; but to the Reds, He is not only now non-existent, but never had existence. That is a worse blasphemy. From it everything else in their regime follows quite logically: without God, no real authority; without real authority, no law and order; without law and order, no genuine freedom; without genuine freedom, no true human life or being. To such people, nothing is sacred; hence, nothing is truly human - for man is a sacred being. I shuddered as these truths seemed to grow out of one another. With God non-existent, the future life a myth, religion only a hoax, where can there be moral law? With no moral law why not lie, murder, rap, starve people, torture? Why not deceive? "

― M. Raymond , The Silent Spire Speaks