The Calvinist is counter-cultural in the modern world. There is much to discuss. There is much to ignore. When matters relate to music, the arts and worship, they come very close to home for composer Abigail J. Fox. These are her occasional essays, not to court controversy but to take a stand.
An age which values itself on parody, burlesque, irony, and caricature, produces little that is sublime, either in genius or in virtue; but they amuse and we live in an age which must be amused, though genius, feeling, truth, and principle be the sacrifice.
~ Hannah More
When the Spirit would glorify Jesus, he humbles you. When he would glorify his fulness, he makes you feel your emptiness. When he would bring you to rely on his strength, he convinces you of your weakness. When he would magnify the comforts of Jesus, he makes you sensible of your misery. When he would fix your heart on his heaven, he makes you feel your deserved hell. When he would exalt his righteousness, you find you are a poor miserable sinner.
~ William Romaine
One error into which even some good people are apt to fall, is that endeavouring to deceive young minds by temporising expedients. In order to allure them to be become religious, they exhibit false, or fait, or inadequate views of Christianity; and while they represent it as it really is, as a life of superior happiness and advantage, they conceal its difficulties, and like the Jesuitical Chinese missionaries, extenuate, or sink, or deny, such parts of it as are least alluring to human pride. In attempting to disguise its principles, they destroy its efficacy. They deny the cross instead of making it the badge of a Christian.
~ Hannah More
There is so little of the Author of Christianity left in his own religion, that an apprehensive believer is ready to exclaim, with the woman at the sepulchre, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.’ The locality of Hell and the existence of an Evil Spirit are annihilated, or considered as abstract ideas. When they are alluded to, it is periphrastically; or they are discontinued not on the ground of their being awful and terrible, but they are set aside as topics too vulgar for the polished, too liberal for the learned, and as savouring too much of credulity for the enlightened.
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