The surest way for evil to triumph in the world is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard. -CS Lewis -Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer

… not a word about the wickedness of war, the wastefulness of war, the appalling scale of the slaughter in war and all the rest of the familiar frenzy; indeed not a word about war at all. There is nothing that throws any particular light on Christ’s attitude towards organised warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond of Roman soldiers. -GK Chesterton, -The Everlasting Man

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Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.

‘I wish it need not have have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.

‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.’

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