Taylor Caldwell

As you know, Michael, that is the greatest of hells to my damned: the final realization that Our Father is

You are wrong, Majesty. I did love; I loved mankind.”

“But never man. Love of an abstraction is not love. It is only absence of human emotion. Love is personal, not universal, save for One. Come

The young of Terra are, this very hour, asking that desperate question, and are wondering why they were ever born, and to what purpose. They call this wonder “the search for identity.” It is indeed a search for what you, and your cohorts on Terra, have denied them. But they will have it! They are turning troubled and thoughtful eyes on the temples which their indifferent fathers raised to God. Man’s questions invoke God’s answer, and it is always forthcoming. Empty days of happy irresponsibility—which the evil consider a very heaven for mankind—lead to the query: “But must I then die, when I have not really lived? What is this that trembles so hungrily in me, that I am not content? I have no cares and no anxieties, and all is planned and controlled for me. Why am I not happy? There is a longing in me which I cannot explain. But, if I have the longing then there is something which will satisfy me. There is never a question without an answer—and I will search for it.”

Far easier is it for a wicked man to turn from his wickedness, than a fool from his folly, for it is the divine life in man which can eventually make him revolt against evil.

But a fool cherishes his foolishness, for it makes him appear, to himself, as of consequence

Alas, this century of which tiny men are so proud! Does it have the splendor of the minds of Greece, and the glory of the law which was Rome? Does it have the scientists of Egypt, the philosophers and the prophets of Israel? Does it have beauty and magnificence and aspiring minds? It stands in dust and war and dinginess, heaped with ugly cities and scarred with the barren wastelands of the stripped earth, its forests felled for the manufacture of trash; its great rivers yoked to yield power and water to crowded and meaningless communities, its silences blasphemed, its retreats and sanctuaries overrun, its countryside howling with drab streets and noxious towns. You and man together—you have done this thing to a world once beautiful and crowned with greenness and fragrance.

The fault lies with many of the past superior minds on Terra: they did not outbreed the baseborn and the vulgar and the stupid, though it was within their power. They were too gentle and too tolerant of the inferior. They refrained from reproducing, whereas the more apish reproduced in vast and multiplying hordes. They had no strong convictions, for they were dubious even of their own valid conclusions. Therefore, they abdicated to the mindless obstinacy of those who could reach no conclusions at all but the satisfaction of their animal instincts. What was more admirable in man, his rationality, his impulse to worship, his contemplative philosophy, his reverence for art, his passion for the true and beautiful, his awe before creation, his respect for the sanctity of the individual soul, his obedience to the laws of virtue and right conduct, has been obliterated in the vehement passion of the hordes for material gratification.

Who can hide from the malicious man? His works are everywhere, his eye clear and without mist, his ear sharp and keen, his tongue tireless. He believes himself good

The search for beauty has damned more men than the search for power

An honest pride is desirable. A prideless man, or woman, is less than the humblest animal. Cultivate your pride in what God has made you.