Somebody Who Had Read Lila Asked Me,

There Is No Justice In Love, No Proportion In It, And There Need Not Be, Because In Any Specific Instance It Is Only A Glimpse Or Parable Of An Embracing, Incomprehensible Reality. It Makes No Sense At All Because It Is The Eternal Breaking In On The Temporal. So How Could It Subordinate Itself To Cause Or Consequence?

The Loss Of Seriousness Seems To Me To Be, In Effect, A Loss Of Hope. I Think That The Thing That Made People Rise To Real Ambition, Real Gravity Was The Sense Of Posterity, For Example - A Word That I Can Remember Hearing Quite Often When I Was A Child And I Never Hear Anymore. People Actually Wanted To Make The World Good For People In Generations That They Would Never See. It Makes People Think In Very Large Terms To Try To Liberate Women, For Example, Or To Try To Eliminate Slavery.

The Only Obligation I Recognize Is To Say What I Believe To Be True [ ] And To Say It With Kindness. I Believe That Is How A Christian Conversation Should Proceed.

That's The Strangest Thing About This Life, About Being In The Ministry. People Change The Subject When They See You Coming. And Then Sometimes Those Very Same People Come Into Your Study And Tell You The Most Remarkable Things. There's A Lot Under The Surface Of Life, Everyone Knows That. A Lot Of Malice And Dread And Guilt, And So Much Loneliness, Where You Wouldn't Really Expect To Find It, Either.

I Really Can't Claim Ever To Have Had An Exceptionally Close Relationship With A Minister. I'm Always There. I Pay My Pledge. I Listen And Observe With Interest. I'm Very Sympathetic With The Rigor And The Aesthetic Quality Of What They Do. Aside From That, I Don't Have A Kind Of Personal Experience With Any Of Them That I Could Consider Privileged, So To Speak.