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21 " Persecution and martyrdom were taken for granted by the Christians as normal conditions of the Church's life. They had been foretold in the gospels and had found their supreme archetype in the example of Christ himself. The martyr was following in his master's steps, and his death expressed that identity between the Head and the Members which was the key principle of the Pauline theory of the Church. Consequently it is not surprising that the idea of martyrdom is the dominant motif of early Christian literature and thought throughout the whole of this period from the New Testament to Eusebius. In the first age of the Church the ideal of sanctity was embodied in the figure of the martyr - the man who 'bears witness' with his blood to the Christian faith. "
― Christopher Henry Dawson , The Formation of Christendom
22 " Thus the coming of Islam seems to be nothing less than a divine judgement on the Byzantine world for its failure to fulfil its mission. And the cause of that failure was the same as that for which St. Ephrem, the greatest of the Syrian Fathers, reproached the Greeks in the fourth century - the unbridled lust for theological controversy which made the most sacred dogmas of the faith slogans of party warfare, sacrificed charity and unity to party spirit. "
23 " No less important than the ideal of martyrdom was that of virginity, which also goes back to the first age of the Church. Indeed the two ideals were associated - first by the cult of virgin martyrs, like St. Agnes, which was so popular, and secondly by the idea that virginity was a kind of living martyrdom, a witness to the power of the faith to transcend human weakness. "
24 " The intellectual climate has become increasingly unfavorable to the study of the relations between religion and culture in the modern world and the modern university. For theology has long since lost its position as a dominant faculty in the university and as an integral part of the general educational curriculum. It continues to exist on sufferance only as a specialized ecclesiastical study designed for the clergy. Consequently the student in a modern university may be totally ignorant of religion. "
25 " Western religion and theology represent a synthesis of two different traditions, the Hebraic tradition of religious revelation, which is represented by the Bible, and the Hellenic tradition of metaphysical or natural theology. "
26 " There is in human nature a hunger and a thirst for the transcendent and the divine which cannot be satisfied with anything less than God. "
27 " The conception of the universe as an intelligible order has inspired the whole development of Western science, alike in classical antiquity and in modern times; and in the formative period of modern science from Galileo to Newton the belief in God as first cause and creator of the order of nature, as well as the supreme governor and lawgiver of the moral world formed an essential part of the scientific 'Weltanschauung'. "
28 " The achievements of modern science are hardly conceivable without the theological preparation which established a link between the subjective order of human reason and an objective rational order in the universe. "
29 " The secular state becomes almost automatically totalitarian, so that no room is left for man's spiritual freedom. "
30 " Modern man may deify science and technology and set up a religion of 'Scientific Humanism' which offers the utopian prospect of unlimited progress. But all such constructions are inevitably fragile, since they are dependent on human will as well as intelligence, and we have seen in our own generation how the irrational element in human nature may prove stronger than scientific intelligence. "
31 " Human nature always retains its spiritual character - its bond with the transcendent and the divine. If it were to lose this, it must lose itself and become the servant of lower powers, so that secular civilization, as Nietzsche saw, inevitably leads to nihilism and to self-destruction. "
32 " If we look at the world today in isolation from the past and the future, the forces of secularism may seem triumphant. This, however, is but a moment in the life of humanity, and it does not possess the promise of stability and permanence. "
33 " The modern ideological world movements - the Enlightenment, Liberalism, Democracy and Socialism - are none of them comprehensible without a knowledge of the Christian culture which underlies them all. "