Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. The World is imperfect; enlightenment comes from the progressive betterment of the World through the beneficent influence of Reason and Nature, the moral order of the Universe is unchanging. In the lowest as well as in the highest strata of human society, filial piety towards parents is wont to recede before other interests. The obscure legends which have been handed down to us from the primeval ages of human society in mythology and folklore give a deplorable idea of the despotic power of the father, and the ruthlessness with which it was exercised. Even in our own middle-class families, the father commonly fosters the growth of the germ of hatred which is naturally inherent in the paternal relation, by refusing to allow the son to be a free agent or by denying him the means of becoming so. A physician often has occasion to remark that a son’s grief at the loss of his father can quench his gratification that he has at last obtained his freedom.  #RyanPhillippe 1 of 8

Fathers, as a rule, cling desperately to as much of the sadly antiquated potestas patris familias as still survives in our modern society, and the poet who, like Ibsen, puts the immemorial strife between father and son in the foreground of his drama is sure of this effect. The causes of conflict between mother and daughter arise when the daughter grows up and finds herself watched by her mother when she longs for real sexual freedom, while the mother is reminded by the budding beauty of her daughter that for her the time has come to renounce sexual claims. All these circumstances are obvious to everyone, but they do not help us to explain dreams of the death of their parents in persons for whom filial piety has long since come to be questionable.  The only way you can get to know the truth of God is to stop trying to find out by being born again. If you obey God in the first thing He shows you, then He instantly opens up the next truth to you. God will never reveal more truth about Himself to you until you have obeyed what you already know. I thank you, Father that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 8

Suppose two similar dates in front of an individual who has a strong desire for them, but who is unable to take them both. Surely the individual will take one of them through a quality in that individual’s nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things. All the distinguishing qualities have mentioned, like beauty or nearness or facility in taking, we can assume to be absent, but still the possibility of the taking remains. You can choose between two answers: either you merely say that an equivalence in respect to one’s desire cannot be imagined—but this is a silly answer, for to assume it is indeed possible—or you say that if an equivalence is assumed, the individual will remain for every hungry and perplexed, looking at the dates without taking one of them, and without a power to choose or to will, distinct from one’s desire. And this again is one of those absurdities which are recognized by the necessity, in the human and the divine, the real working of the act of choice, must necessarily admit a quality the nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things.  #RyanPhillippe 3 of 8

No one likes to acknowledge that they have made a mistake in the choice of one’s profession, and every individual, worthy of the name, will row long against wind and tide before one allow oneself to cry out, “I am baffled!” and submits to be floated passively back to land. Every individual’s work, pursed steadily, tends to become an end itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of one’s life. Reason can find no preference, that will is incapable of any immediate selection, yet delay is dangerous and pointless. The imagination, moreover, is most strongly affected by what is suggested or hinted at and not by what is plainly stated. Fear plays a large part in our enjoyment of the sublime. Such fear is diminished by knowledge, but sharpened by veiled intimations. Obscurity, not clarity, is the property of the most powerfully moving art; it is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions. The first duty of rulers and legislators is to the present, not to the future; their energies should be devoted to the correction of real ills, not to the promotion of an ideal order that exists only in the imagination. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 8

An employer owes a good worker something beyond the wages paid, and a worker owes a good employer something beyond work done. We must put great faith in the inherited wisdom of tradition. The moral order of the temporal World must necessarily include some evil, by reason of original sin. People ought not to reject what is good in tradition merely because there is some admixture of evil in it. In human’s confused situation, advantages may lie in balances and compromises between good and evil, even between one evil and another. It is an important part of wisdom to know how much evil should be tolerated. To search for too great a purity is only to produce fresh corruption. People are simply not at liberty to destroy the state and its institutions in the hope of some contingent improvement. On the other hand, people have a paramount duty to prevent the World from getting worse—a duty to guard their inherited liberties and privileges. A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that His stillness is contagious—it gets into you, causing you to become perfectly confident so that you can honestly say, “I know that God has heard me.” #RyanPhillippe 5 of 8

One day, I found a lady depressed and weeping. She said: “I do not want to see my relatives any more; they must shudder at me.” Thereupon, almost without any transition, she tells me that she had remembered a dream, whose significance, of course, she does not understand. It seems that it was contrary to nature and therefore impossible to achieve liberty without any real knowledge of what she meant by it. It does moral social hard by pretending that real differences were unreal, as they inspire false hopes and vain expectations in those destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life. God’s silence is the very proof that He has heard you. If Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorying of His Father, the He will give you the first sign of His intimacy—silence. Although God often speaks the language understood by that age—the language of calculation, expediency, utility, and political rights—He has a mind which His contemporaries, and many others, cannot readily comprehend. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 8

Being conscious, above all things, of the reality and unavoidability of evil, might lead one to the claim that the only hope for humankind is to cling to safeguards which have stood the tests of time. One’s hope for bliss may lay in Heaven; on Earth, our policy is to defend the tolerable, and sometimes the bad, against the immeasurably worse. Instead of becoming less personal, we are required to become more personal. What we could gloss over in other circumstances can no longer be avoided. Whereas we may have seen each other through a glass darkly, now we are to attend to each other in person and in the same location. The transition from a negative to an optimistic event requires our human presence. Of what does human presence consist? The end and the means of human presence are truth in the situation. There is to be as much full human contact as possible. What we say and what we do is communication in the search of communion. We intentionally seek a relationship. There is no dignity and no courage in deception. Living calls out all of our fullness.  #RyanPhillippe 7 of 8

If we have known only a fraction of the truth previously, now we are to know it as fully as possible. For that is the heart of love, and faith and grace somehow have their grounding in love. The issue is not whether we share what is happening. Instead the issue is how we share what is happening. Truth that looms so awesome in anticipation looks so simple in retrospect. What we felt would damage and destroy, we discover actually helps us heal. However, how to see reality and how to get to the truth seems so complicated. One must understand, it does not force presence where one prefers privacy. It does not perpetuate privacy where one wants presence. Truth creates a genuinely human relationship. With such an invitation from the living, what matters is reaching out in love. We can help others by responding to their life situation as theirs. Many people may still be in a state of shocked denial. They may have moved into bitterness and envy. They may engage in magical maneuverings, negotiating now for this and now for that. They may be staggered by the loss of livelihood and life and love. They may have found the peace that nothing can dislodge. What is important is not what they are experiencing, but rather that we be present to them in their experience. #RyanPhillippe 8 of  8