MIRACLES

'...a miracle was simply a break in the continuity of an order itself more miraculous.' 

Bruce Marshall, The Fair Bride, p.119. 

EPISCOPAL PLATITUDES

'The Bishop had the clerical gift of pronouncing platitudes so fervently that they sounded original.' 

Bruce Marshall, The Fair Bride, p.24. 

SEX

'"I still prefer to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God..."' 

Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh and Father Smith,  p.108. 

MEN

'"...men are much of a mediocrity...vaunters about what they can't do, humble about what they can; liars in safety, truthful in danger; cowardly in smoke-rooms and brave in shell-holes; lewd with strange women and tender with their wives; hating the misery they can't see and succouring that which they can; stupid with books and clever with spanners; all with bellies and all alone with the stars and the sky not caring; all so very pitful when you see them asleep; and all stamped in God's image, all fearfully and wonderfully made, all with eyelashes and fingernails and ears."'

Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh and Father Smith, p.138.

SOCIAL ACTION

'"One of the reasons that the world is not convinced is, I think, that men believe that the Church, which they confuse with churchmen, teaches a short-range rather than a long-range morality. They hear the adulterer, the thief, and the murderer condemned from our pulpits, but not the the employer of sweated labour, not the shareholder in the armaments factory, not the men who make their money out of films about gangsters, not the politicians who compromise with the perpetrators of cruelty in faraway lands. They argue that, in the eyes of the Church, a man who owns shares in a company which makes its profits through underpaying Chinese coolies is a good Christian so long as he doesn't murder the friend who beats him at golf or cohabit with his parlour maid. We, who are priests, know this is not the teaching of the Church, but can we honestly say that we have taken the trouble to let men of good faith know that is not the teaching of the Church? For, as is evident, many men of good faith remain outside the Church. Is it not for us to ask ourselves if we have not, by condeming only those sins which it takes little courage to chasten, prevented them from finding their way into the Fold which is Christ's?"'

Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh and Father Smith, p.134.

THE CHURCH

'"...both the stupid and the intelligent have always crowded out the Church of God; it is the half-educated who have always been too proud to come in."'

Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh and Father Smith, p.61.

PREACHING

'...perhaps it was just that it was the hardest thing in the world for one human being to shine into another human being the glow that burned within himself, even when the glow was from God.'

Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh and Father Smith, p.11.

SUFFERING

'"That's the great thing about persecution: it keeps you up to the mark. It's habit, not hatred, that is the real enemy of the church of God."'

Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh and Father Smith, p.6.