The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crime...s of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I shall not want Society in Heaven, Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;... Her anecdotes will be more amusing Than Pipit's experience could provide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scholars and thinkers are prone to an effeminate habit, and shrink if a coarser shout comes up from the street, or a brutal act is... recorded in the journals. The Medical College piles up in its museum its grim monsters of morbid anatomy, and there are melancholy skeptics with a taste for carrion who batten on the hideous facts in history,--persecutions, inquisitions, St. Bartholomew, massacres, devilish lives, Nero, Caesar Borgia, Marat, Lopez; men in whom every ray of humanity was extinguished, patricides, matricides and whatever moral monsters. These are not cheerful facts, but they do not disturb a healthy mind; they require of us a patience as robust as the energy that attacks us, and an unresting exploration of final causes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It prov...es that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »