"The human longing for God, however, persists from age to age."

"The distinctly modern metaphysical picture of reality is one that makes it possible to regard this world as a cave filled only with flickering shadows and yet also to cherish those shadows for their very insubstantiality, and even to be grateful for the shelter that the cave provides against the great emptiness outside, where no Sun of the Good ever shines. With enough therapy and sufficient material comforts, even gnostic despair can become a form of disenchantment without regret, sweetened by a new enchantment with the self in its particularity. Gnosticism reduced to bare narcissism—which, come to think of it, might be an apt definition of late modernity as a whole.
     ". . . This is no cause for despair, however. Every historical period has its own presiding powers and principalities on high. Ours, for what it is worth, seem to want to make us happy, even if only in an inert sort of way. Every age passes away in time, moreover, and late modernity is only an epoch. This being so, one should never doubt the uncanny force of what Freud called die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten—'the return of the repressed.'  Dominant ideologies wither away, metaphysical myths exhaust their power to hold sway over cultural imaginations, material and spiritual conditions change inexorably and irreversibly. The human longing for God, however, persists from age to age. A particular cultural dispensation may succeed for a time in lulling the soul into a forgetful sleep, but the soul will still continue to hear that timeless call that comes at once from within and from beyond all things, even if for now it seems like only a voice heard in a dream. And, sooner or later, the sleeper will awaken."

     David Bentley Hart, "Jung's therapeutic gnosticism," First things (January 2013).

Not (here) the dangers of holding one another accountable, but the dangers of a disingenuous "repentance"

"The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing—but, first, of denouncing—the conduct of others."

     C. S. Lewis, "Dangers of national repentance," in God in the dock:  essays on theology and ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970), 190 (189-192).

Newman on the dormition of St. Peter

"The regalia Petri might sleep, as the power of a chancellor has slept; not as an obsolete, for it never had been operative, but as a mysterious privilege, which was not understood; as an unfulfilled prophecy."

     John Henry Newman, An essay on the development of Christian doctrine: the edition of 1845, ed. J. M. Cameron (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1974), 209 (III.iv.4).

"after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church"

Scripture "cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures."

     John Henry Newman, An essay on the development of Christian doctrine:  the edition of 1845, ed. J. M. Cameron (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England:  Penguin Books, 1974), 162 (II.ii.6).

"And then, in the fullness of time, God changed his hiding place."

     A lovely little "Christmas meditation" by Ronald A. Knox, in which the turning point is the Incarnation of course, but also the transition from the Wisdom of God in creation to "our Mother, come out to help in the search":  "Ostende," Pastoral and occasional sermons, ed. Evelyn Waugh (New York:  Sheed & Ward, 1960), pp. 359-361.

"We never doubted that the unorthodox opinions were honestly held: what we complain of is your continuing your ministry after you have come to hold them."

     C. S. Lewis, "Christian apologetics" (Easter 1945), God in the dock:  essays on theology and ethics (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), 90.  Cf. Dietrich von Hildebrand.

"The real pacificus is he who promotes peace, not he who gasses about it."

     C. S. Lewis, "Delinquents in the snow," Time and tide 38 (7 December 1957):  1522 (1521-5122), as quoted in God in the dock:  essays on theology and ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970), 309-310.