Comber on the use of forms

"we can pray by this Form with as much Zeal and more Knowledge, with as much Spirit and more Truth, than by any other kind of Prayer."

     Thomas Comber, A companion to the Temple, or A help to devotion in the use of the Common prayer (1672-76/1684), as quoted in Prayer book spirituality, ed. J. Robert Wright (New York:  The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1989), 36, under "The mistaken dissenters".

Johnson on the use of forms

"let me farther assure you, that now after near forty years use of our excellent method of worship, . . . it is so far from growing tedious or a matter of formality, as some imagine, that every opportunity seems to add fresh life, and I see fresh beauties, and find further advantages in it from time to time."

     Samuel Johnson, On the beauty of holiness in the worship of the Church of England (1749), as quoted in Prayer book spirituality, ed. J. Robert Wright (New York:  The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1989), 51.

"the habitat of natural gifts is the natural man."

"beware of showing God's grace and its work at such disadvantage as to make the few whom it has thoroughly influenced compete in intellect with the vast multitude who either have it not, or use it ill.  The elect are few to choose out of, and the world is inexhaustible.  From the first, Jabel and Tubalcain, Nimrod 'the stout hunter', the learning of the Pharaohs, and the wisdom of the East country, are of the world.  Every now and then they are rivalled by a Solomon or a Beseleel, but the habitat of natural gifts is the natural man."

     John Henry Newman, The idea of a university defined and illustrated, Discourse IX.7 (ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1976), 196).

"the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end"

"If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society.  Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world.  It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other.  Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations.  It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its precincts.  Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope.  But a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end. . . ."

     John Henry Newman, The idea of a university defined and illustrated, Discourse VII.10 (ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1976), 154).
     Note the word "must" in that first sentence.  In the two previous Discources Newman has argued that "Knowledge" (or, rather, the inculcation of the habit of thinking about what one has learned) is "Its Own End" above all (V).
     Note, too, that Newman does not claim that "a University training is the [only] means" to the inculcation of a habit of "Thought or Reason exercised upon Knowledge" (VI.7 (pp. 124-125)).

"you must be above your knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you; and the more you have of it, the greater will be the load."

     John Henry Newman, The idea of a university defined and illustrated, Discourse VI.7 (ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1976), 125).

"Here is Russia and here is France, and we are in the middle; that is my map of Africa."

"'Your map of Africa is all very fine,' Bismarck famously told the traveller and writer Eugen Wolf, 'but my map of Africa lies in Europe.  Here is Russia and here is France, and we are in the middle; that is my map of Africa.'"

"'I h r e Karte von Afrika ist ja sehr schön, aber meine Karte von Afrika liegt in Europa.  Hier liegt Russland, and hier'—nach links deutend—'liegt Frankreich und wir sind in der Mitte; das ist m e i n e Karte von Afrika.'"

     As quoted by Niall Ferguson (but with the emphasis in the original reinserted) in "Balancing acts," Times literary supplement no. 5758 (August 9, 2013), 4 (3-4), a review of Brenda Simms' Europe:  the struggle for supremacy, 1453 to the present (London:  Allen Lane, 2013).  German (following Wikiquotes) from Eugen Wolf, Vom Fürsten Bismarck und seinem Haus:  Tagebuchblätter von Eugen Wolf, 2nd ed. (Berlin:  Egon Fleischel & Co., 1904), 16.  (I'm not seeing an earlier edition in WorldCat.)

"the penetrating Catholic intelligence of John Courtney Murray is difficult to imagine outside of a church that could not through the exercise, in Gleason's words, of 'raw ecclesiastical power, wielded in utter contempt of academic freedom,' silence John Courtney Murray."

     Mark Noll, "Reconsidering Christendom?", in Mark A. Noll and James Turner, The future of Christian learning:  an Evangelical and Catholic dialogue, ed. Thomas Albert Howard (Grand Rapids, MI:  Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2008), 51.

     Noll refers to Philip Gleason, Contenting with modernity:  Catholic higher education in the twentieth century (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 282.