ANGER

'Anger is as basic to our condition as bipedal locomotion and opposable thumbs. If you are a person with a mind and emotions, you will find anger.

To make this search even more important, remember that angers hides. The angry person is always the last person to know that he or she is angry.'

Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.154.

SUFFERING

'Isn't it true that suffering reveals us? While prosperity allows us to hide, hardships peel off masks we didn't even know we were wearing. During the better times, we can be happy, unafraid, confident and optimistic, but the lean years reveal the best and worst in us. Put a dozen relatively like-minded people into the same crisis and you will see a dozen different responses. Some are heroes, others are cowards. Some are leaders, others are followers. Some are optimists, others despair. Some shake their fists at God, others quietly submit. You don't really know who you are until you have gone through suffering. We can measure our spiritual growth by the way we behave under pressure.'

Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.134.

EVIL

'In the worst of times, there is still more cause to complain of a an evil heart than of an evil world.'

Robert Fleming in Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.76.

HELL

'Hell was abolished around the same time that abortion was legalized and the death penalty was done away with. It would not be surprising to peer into an old Hansard from the middle 1960s and find that the House of Commons had quietly passed the Infernal Regions (Closure) Act one unseasonably hot Friday afternoon when the Scottish MPs were all away. A beaming Roy Jenkins would have found parliamentary time for it, as part of his efforts to make Britain a more "civilized" society. Like so many similar reforms, making Satan redundant was or appeared to be a change whose time had come. After all, nobody went to Hell any more, did they?'

Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, p.107.

SUFFERING

The challenge for us is to think as God thinks. In other words, our present thinking must be turned upside-down. We once thought that suffering was to be avoided at all costs; now we must understand that the path to becoming more like Jesus goes through hardship, and it is much better than the path of brief and superficial comfort without Jesus. When we understand this grand purpose, we discover that suffering does not oppose love; it is a result of it (Heb. 12:8). We are under the mistaken impression that divine love cannot coexist with human pain. Such thinking is one of Satan's most effective strategies.'

Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.70.

DEPRESSION

'No sin is necessarily connected with sorrow of heart, for Jesus Christ our Lord once said, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death." There was no sin in Him, and consequently none in His deep depression.'

Charles Spurgeon in Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.32.

DEPRESSION

'Depression is a form of suffering that can't be reduced to one universal cause. This means that family and friends can't rush in armed with THE answer. Instead, they must be willing to postpone swearing allegiance to a particular theory, and take time to know the depressed person and work together with him or her. What we do know is that depression is painful and, if you have never experienced it, hard to understand.'

Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.14.

CHRISTIANITY

'All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality. That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.117.

MIRACLES

'Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.111.

MARRIAGE

'Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I'm afraid, even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again; so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go doing it more conveniently.'

CS Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, p.201 of The Complete Chronicles of Narnia.

EDUCATION

'I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.103.

WORDS

'It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "the social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognised by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.91.