Quotes about Reformers

The name which I have selected will prepare the reader to expect no new doctrines in this volume. It is simple, unadulterated, old-fashioned Evangelical theology. It contains nothing but the "Old Paths" in which the Apostolic Christians, the Reformers, the best English Churchmen for the last three hundred years, and the best Evangelical Christians of the present day, have persistently walked.

Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

The Reformers, therefore, as instruments in the hands of God, in delivering the Church from bondage to prelates, did not make it a tumultuous multitude, in which every man was a law to himself, free to believe, and free to do what he pleased.

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.

There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation.

Most reformers wore rubber boots and stood on glass when God sent a current of Commonsense through the Universe.

I'm now reading Tertullian, Cyprian, and others of the church fathers with great interest. In some ways they are more relevant to our time than the Reformers, and at the same time they provide a basis for talks between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

Hence, the Reformers dramatically failed to put their finger on the nerve of the original problem: a clergy-led worship service attended by a passive laity. It is not surprising, then, that the Reformers viewed themselves as reformed Catholics.

It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.

Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.

Most reformers wore rubber boots and stood on glass when God sent a current of Commonsense through the Universe.