Chunks

Chunks of good writing from a variety of authors

Alice Thomas Ellis

...  What if God had chosen to send his daughter to redeem us? What would the feminists say to that? You can bet your boots – and your hat, coat and gloves  -- that they'd be whining that women had to do everything; men were just absolutely hopeless and never did anything useful. Here was this woman suffering unspeakable agonies for us and what were the men doing, eh? One 'feminist theologian' I spoke to gave it as her opinion that if Our Lord couldn't be represented as female then females couldn't be sure that they were redeemed. I know people are thick but surely they can't be as thick as that.

As long as equality is construed as being 'identical' we are going down skidding on good intentions to the inky bottom. The Cardinal, a well-meaning soul, has just said something about the Church 'going forward' – an unfortunate concept to apply to an edifice built upon a rock. If it starts paddling like a poodle in all directions after whatever fad or fancy is presently beguiling the 'intellectuals', it will collapse into nothing more than a pizza parlour (a nightmare predicted in the light of newly-built churches ) and everyone can choke on their chosen flavour.

-- Chunk taken from The Third Oldie Annual 1997.

I cannot see how anyone with any self-knowledge, anyone who is not a psychopath, irrevocably vain or mentally unstable, can hold a completely favourable and optimistic view of mankind. Not on the evidence. Yet the more we see of the atrocity, corruption and cruelty, the more people maintain they are the result of socio-economic causes, of tyranny or religion, as though these forces arose independently of mankind and man himself was blameless. Few people with pretensions to intellectual respectability believe in the devil, and the concept of Original Sin is considered outdated. On the principle that once all the possibilities and probabilities have been examined and discarded, then what remains, no matter how unlikely or unwelcome, must necessarily be the case, I find belief in the in the devil and Original Sin inevitable. And just as the optimist will claim that the world in its loveliness is a foretaste of Heaven (if indeed he goes so far as to believe in Heaven) so may the pessimist suggest in its vileness it prefigures Hell ...

-- Taken from Alice Thomas Ellis' book Serpent on the Rock (Hodder&Stoughton 1994).

Osbert Sitwell observed that human beings display 'the identical comination of flaming pride and meek submission that distinguishes the camel' and this, I think, is fair. We trust in our reason, in our purely human abilities, until something goes contrary to our plans, at which we sink to our knees whining that it is the fault of fate, the state, God, or just something else. We do not adapt well to adversity, seldom accepting it as the will of our Maker, but seeing it as an undeserved evil.

-- Taken from Alice Thomas Ellis' book Serpent on the Rock (Hodder&Stoughton 1994).