The importance of the lesson which this [Holy Name] Society was formed to teach would be hard to overestimate. Its main purpose is to impress upon the people the necessity for reverence. This is the beginning of a proper conception of ourselves, of our relationship to each other, and our relationship to our Creator. Human nature cannot develop very far without it. The mind does not unfold, the creative faculty does not mature, the spirit does not expand, save under the influence of reverence. It is the chief motive of an obedience. It is only by a correct attitude of mind begun early in youth and carried through maturity that these desired results are likely to be secured. It is along the path of reverence and obedience that the race has reached the goal of freedom, of self-government, of a higher morality, and a more abundant spiritual life.

—Calvin Coolidge
from a speech to members of the Holy Name Society, a Catholic men's group (September 1924)

—Pope St. Gregory the Great
(540-604)

C. S. Lewis points out that the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, and the founder of the New Covenant, Jesus Christ, have in common "something pretty substantial" with regard to their moral teaching. (He lists other figures too.) He then adds a footnote, explaining that he includes "the Incarnate God" alongside human teachers to emphasize that the main difference between Christ and these other figures lies not in ethics but ontology; it is Christ's "Person and Office" that are unique, not his teachings.

In his essay "The Psalms" (1958?), he contends that the Jewish and Christian traditions are not so distinct as they are sometimes held to be. He mentions that he has been reading the Old Testament and has been surprised by a verse from the book of the Proverbs (25:21): "If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty give him water to drink." He confesses to being taken aback: "One rubs one's eyes. So they were saying that already. They knew that so long before Christ came." Such a concern for one's enemy has no counterpart in Greek teaching nor in Confucian morality, he says. There is a striking continuity between Old and New Testaments in terms of teaching: the wholly new thing about Christ is not the ethic he taught but who he was and what he did.

—Michael Ward
After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man (2021), p. 103

—Margery Allingham
The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)

—Julien Benda
The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs), ch. 3 (1927)

Things had come to such a pitch in the churches, by the intensity of the revival system, that the permanent was sacrificed to the casual, the ordinary swallowed up and lost in the extraordinary, and Christian piety itself reduced to a kind of campaigning of stage-effect exercise. The spirit of the pastor was broken and his powers crippled by a lack of expectation: for it was becoming a fixed impression that effect is to be looked for only under instrumentalities that are extraordinary. . . . It was even difficult for the pastor, saying nothing of conversions, to keep alive in Christians themselves any hope or expectations of holy living as an abiding state, in the intervals of public movement and excitement left to his care; because everything was brought to the test of the revival state as a standard, and it could not be conceived how any one might be in the Spirit and maintain a constancy of growth in the calmer and more private methods of duty, patience, and fidelity, on the level of ordinary life.

—Horace Bushnell
(recollections of early ministry, ca. 1870)

—James R. Edwards
From Christ to Christianity (2021)

—Pr. Larry Peters
Pastoral Meanderings (October 30, 2021)