Ralph Adams Cram

“ I refer to the practise of withdrawal from the world of ordinary life and from the usual occupations of men, into some solitary or sequestered place, where in hermitage or monastery they might give themselves up to contemplation, meditation or prayer, and to such labours in library or garden as should best fit the mind to be the dwelling-place of whatever thoughts might seem to them the highest, best and most beautiful. ”

“ The spiritual quest, the retreat into the wilderness unstained by radios, motor cars, advertising, newspapers, bond-salesmen, and insurance solicitors; the desirability of getting acquainted with one's soul, and through this, with God—these are the things that at the most moderate estimate are regarded with indifference by the world, which has gone its troubled way with far other goals in view and by immeasurably alien paths. That success has been the issue is a thesis hardly tenable, but in the chaos of failure there are few that envisage the right way. ”

“ Nothing could be dreamed of less consonant with contemporary methods and motives than the life of withdrawal, meditation, prayer, and intercession. All we think of, conceive of as desirable and potent, is an everlasting doing of something, it really doesn't very much matter what, so long as it means efficiency and mass-production ”

“ And as, to my way of thinking, such sequestered habits and practises are of the essence of Christianity, for without them it goes about its tasks, halt and maimed, in helpless inadequacy, so also I believe that the individual life, unless it takes advantage of those practises, withdrawing apart to think high thoughts, and to reconsider by the light of such thoughts its hopes, ambitions, and desires, is, and must be, imperfect. ”

“ It is this cloistered life that reveals reality. "In the monastic system we shall find recorded a great part of whatever success men have achieved in their search for spiritual wisdom," for "faith and imagination are the two distinguishing habits of mind, the two factors of knowledge, the two primal conditions of human existence ”

“ I mean fellowship in withdrawal, and the loss of all sense of personal gain or gratification through this companionship and in the helping and saving of others. As Mr Sedgwick says, "No man can save his own soul without necessarily helping his brother save his soul likewise," and it is equally true that no man can save his brother's soul, or any part of him, without helping to save his own soul. ”

“ The old serene satisfaction of the fifty years that assembled around the turn of the century, is gone, and in its place has come disillusionment, with scathing depreciation following after. It is in America that the attack is most fast and furious, but constructive vision does not match destructive criticism, such as there is coming rather from England. ”

“ What happens, by some intractable fate, is paralleled by our political and social courses, where, in some nominal monarchy, a popularized parliamentary system breaks down in venality and incompetence, and a revolutionary progress is made into anarchy by way of a theoretical "republic," as in Portugal, China, Russia, and the tottering states of the dismembered "Central Empires." ”

“ So far as the present generation is concerned—perfect style in the writing of English is not a common aim, and even good things come before us in slovenly, headlong shape, or disguised in the cheap trappings of a rough colloquialism. ”

“ There is a danger in the process, and that is the chance that the method may result in a certain over-intellectualizing of truths, the building up of a theory that may be right and yet not closely enough related to life itself to achieve vitality. ”