Warfield

“ I can never rid myself for one moment of the idea that an engine really works, with weary, reluctant strength like a genii slave, waiting vengefully for the time of retaliation, which sooner or later is sure to come; or of the visionary notion that a graceful, gliding ship, with all sails set, receives the same pleasure from its own motion and beauty that a snow-white swan must do "as down she bears before the gale," with her white plumage and stately crest.
I think, if ever I am called to give a toast, it shall be "Sail-ships; may their shadows never be less!" ”

“ Warwick, Oxford, Salisbury, Suffolk, every man to the front! My banner to the front also! Your horses, fair sirs! The archers are spent, and our own good lances must win the field this day. Advance, Walter, and may God and Saint George be with England!”
Sir Walter Woodland, riding a high black horse, took station by the Prince, with the royal banner resting in a socket by his saddle. From all sides the knights and squires crowded in upon it, until they formed a great squadron containing the survivors of the battalions of Warwick and Salisbury as well as those of the Prince. ”

“ The more the Westminster Confession of Faith is studied, and the better it is understood, the less likely is it to be either abandoned, explained away, or patched up with scraps of cruder new thinking. ”

“ Enter Warwick, Clarence, Oxford, Somerset, and French Soldiers, silent all.
War. This is his tent; and see where stand his guard.
Courage, my masters! honour now or never! ⁠24
But follow me, and Edward shall be ours.
1. Watch. Who goes there?
2. Watch. Stay, or thou diest.
Warwick and the rest cry all, ‘Warwick! Warwick!’ and set upon the Guard, who fly, crying, ‘Arm! Arm!' Warwick and the rest following them.
The drum playing and trumpet sounding, enter Warwick, Somerset, and the rest, bringing the King out in his gown, sitting in a chair. Richard and Hastings fly over the stage. ”

“ I cannot think it consistent with essential honesty to accept a creed, or to continue to live under a creed which we have accepted, for system of doctrine—the system of doctrine of which we do not believe. For a Church to impose a formula which she does not intend to be taken in its strictest sense and to require to be lived up to, it seems to me, would be dishonest in her, and would be a betrayal of her trust as the pillar and ground of the truth. ”

“ Our infantry were encamped under canvas in the immediate vicinity of Warburg, the quaint old German streets of which presented a lively picture of campaigning life, for every house had been converted into a barrack; soldiers in British or Hanoverian uniforms appeared at all the windows, lounging, laughing, and smoking, or pipeclaying their belts or gaiters. Piles of muskets stood in long rows upon the pavements. Here and there a sentinel trod to and fro upon his post, indicating the quarters of a colonel or where the colours of a regiment were lodged. ”

“ If we, however, range the world over and gather together indiscriminately all the objections that have been made to the Westminster Confession during these last years, we are in danger of confusing even such opposite points of view as these. In the midst of such an agitation for change as has arisen in the American Church during the last months, therefore, it seems necessary for us to take a general glance over the Presbyterian world with a view to tracing the causes which are working in one place or another, to the production of this restlessness. ”

“ If we have a defensible right to be Presbyterians, we have as just a right to our separate creed as to our separate organization.
And who is to determine for us the minimum of truth which Christian men are bound to confess? Is it so easy a matter to distinguish between such essential doctrines as we dare not mar our witness to, and the unessential ones which we may suppress public confession of for the sake of outward unity of organization? Does not the line of division fluctuate from age to age? ”

“ When we are told of any man that he was a hundred and thirty years old when he begat his heir, and lived after that eight hundred years begetting sons and daughters, dying only at the age of nine hundred and thirty years, all these items coöperate to make a vivid impression upon us of the vigor and grandeur of humanity in those old days of the world's prime. ”

“ I love those hills of Warwick--many a glorious day have I passed in their green recesses; many a wild tale have I heard of sylvan sport and forest warfare, and many, too, of patriot partisanship in the old revolutionary days--the days that tried men's souls--while sitting at my noontide meal by the secluded wellhead, under the canopy of some primeval oak, with implements of woodland sport, rifle or shot-gun by my side, and well-broke setter or stanch hound recumbent at my feet. ”

“ But it is strange that those born and bred among us should occasionally fall into the same error. It would be a revolution of our whole point of view were the American Presbyterian Church to undertake a revision of the Confession, or to attempt to frame a new and more primary Confession to substitute for it, on the ground that the present Confession is not throughout believed by our people, or that it is too abstruse or difficult to be easily understood by the less instructed and less advanced among them. The Confession is not a popular document. ”

“ A regiment of Warwickshire militia, probably commanded by the Earl, was going through its drill in the market-place; and on the collar of one of the officers was embroidered the Bear and Ragged Staff, which has been the cognizance of the Warwick earldom from time immemorial. The soldiers were sturdy young men, with the simple, stolid, yet kindly, faces of English rustics, looking exceedingly well in a body, but slouching into a yeoman-like carriage and appearance, the moment they were dismissed from drill. ”

“ Worcester, then with a population of little more than three thousand, had full and well disciplined companies of artillery, cavalry, riflemen, and two very large companies of infantry. Mr. Ward took great pleasure in military affairs, and was ambitious to excel and become a good disciplinarian ”

“ Thus, while the theology of the Reformed churches was being matured, and the course of controversy was bringing it about that the deepest and broadest lines of thought, which run through all the Christian ages, were engrossing the minds of men, a body of pious and devoted preachers of the word was being prepared, who could not state the precious truths of the Gospel without suffusing their statement with the breath of true godliness. ”

“ No one who looks back upon the history of early Protestantism can fail to perceive that the times were ripening toward the middle of the seventeenth century, and especially in England, for just such an enterprise. During the century or more that had elapsed since the Reformation, the Reformed Theology had developed into a mature and maturely tested system of truth, tried everywhere by the Scriptures and in the fires of controversy. ”

“ Fort Warden, the great outcome of the Major's career, the splendid achievement on the strength of which he had retired from active service, thus stood justified beyond all cavil or dispute.
Yet, as he gazed towards the work of his hands, Wardlaw's heart was full of grief and bitterness. There stood the Fort in all its pride and strength; around it lay the victims of its fury; within it less than three hundred foreigners still defied thousands of British troops on British soil. Above it floated, so far, in victory, two foreign Eagles—the flags of Germany and the United States. ”

“ The Confession already provides firm ground for all who believe that all those that die in infancy are elect, and it does this without dogmatism and without sacrificing its moderation and calm guardedness of statement. Why sacrifice this? No one can doubt that what the Confession asserts is exactly true: that "elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when and where and how He pleaseth." ”

“ Preterition, or negative reprobation, is an eternal decree of God, purposing within Himself to deny unto the non-elect that peculiar love of His wherewith election is accompanied, as, also, that special grace which infallibly bringeth to glory. ”

“ Perhaps, at bottom, we are face to face here, in more or less developed form, with one application of the modern doctrine of the "Christian consciousness." But at all events it has little fitness among us. Presbyterians do not look upon their creed as the expression of what their people believe: but rather as the expression of what they ought to believe. Like the perfect moral standard of life—the divine perfection; this creed strives to represent the perfect intellectual standard of faith—the divine truth. ”

“ In a word, a public confession, by virtue of the very fact that it is public, cannot be, and ought not to be pretended to be, just the expression of his faith which each one who accepts it as representing his faith would have framed had he only himself to consider. ”

“ We do not ask our people to profess faith in all its articles at the outset of their Christian course: we ask them to set their faces toward it—as they set their faces toward sanctification—as the goal of their understanding of divine truth. It is the standard of the teaching they are to receive, not of the knowledge they have already assimilated: it represents not the minimum of knowledge that the Church demands ere she receives a soul into her communion, but the maximum that she expects to train her people to in the prosecution of her work as a teacher sent from God. ”

“ No less an one than Calvin teaches us how impossible it is to avoid confessing the doctrine of sovereign reprobation if we confess the doctrine of election, of which it is not the logical inference, but the other half—writing with some sharpness: "Many, as if they wished to avert odium from God, so confess election as to deny that any one is reprobated. But this is puerile and absurd, because election itself could not exist without being opposed to reprobation. ”

“ A profound religious-ethical significance is given to the differentiations of the peoples, in the story of the tower of Babel in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, in which the divergences and separations which divide mankind are represented as the product of sin: what God had joined together men themselves pulled asunder. ”

“ It is not confined to these companies alone either, for aside from the efficient duty performed by her company in the naval brigade, there were many individual enlistments in regular regiments and there was the splendid work done at the United States armory in turning out the arms with which the troops were equipped. As in the Civil war the works were run day and night and the force of employees trebled. There was good work done too at the recruiting station and it is not too much to say that Springfield was a prominent factor in the war from its beginning to its close. ”

“ Closely connected with this discussion of the mode of origination of man, has been the discussion of two further questions, both older than the Darwinian theory, to one of which it gave, however, a new impulse, while it has well-nigh destroyed all interest in the other. ”

“ The previous day eight burghers had been wounded there. Red Danie Opperman was Field-Cornet. Not far from us, to our left, stood a few of our cannon, and facing us, to our left, on the long mountain slope, we could see fourteen guns of the enemy's. In front of us was a large wood, and close to that the English camp. We could see the enemy moving in great close square masses. It was a terribly hot day; we had to lie in the trenches, as all day long the enemy fired at us from the smaller positions facing us, at a distance of 15,000 paces; and constantly the bombs burst over our heads. ”

“ And, on the other hand, the men of tenderness of conscience and pure heart toward God and men, have leaned not only to the Confession of the permanently central truths, but to the eager and solemn Confession of whatever truth the time and its trial called for—to its Confession not only individually, but by the unanimous and accordant voice of the witnessing Church of Christ. ”

“ The prevalence of the evolutionary hypotheses has removed all motive for denying a common origin to the human race, and rendered it natural to look upon the differences which exist among the various types of man as differentiations of a common stock. The motive for denying their conclusiveness having been thus removed, the convincing evidences of the unity of the race have had opportunity to assert their force. ”

“ Although the first serious encounter between the opposing parties took place in the neighbouring county of Worcester on September 23, when Prince Rupert gained an advantage over a body of Parliamentarian troops, what may be called the first battle of the war took place just a month later, a little to the south of Kineton, on the plain below Edge Hill, by which latter name the engagement is known. ”

“ Our first work there was to fortify ourselves; for we could not but expect strong opposition in it: seeing there lay at Leeds 1,500 of the Enemy, and 1,200 at Wakefield; neither above six or seven miles from us. They visited us every day with their Horse; for ours went not far from the town, being so unequal in number: yet they seldom returned without loss. Till, at length, our few men grew so bold; and theirs, so disheartened: as they durst not stir a mile out of their garrison. ”