"for we cannot be saved without you"

God of mercy,

free your Church from sin

and protect it from evil.

Guide us, for we cannot be saved without you.

     Oratio, Evening prayer, Liturgy of the hours (Christian prayer, p. 323); and Collecta, Roman missal (cf. CTS new daily missal, p. 1384, below), Monday, Third Week of Lent.

     Something about that fourth line of the old English translation of the 1970s (now a hangover in the Liturgy of the hours) always takes my breath away, though it is an inaccurate rendition of the mid-8th-century, Gelasian-Sacramentary original (ed. Mohlberg (1960), no. 1218 on p. 181; Bruylants, vol. 2, no. 521; Corpus orationum no. 2418):

Ecclesiam tuam, Domine, miseratio continuata mundet et muniat, et, quia sine te non potest salva consístere, tuo semper munere gubernetur.  Per.

Here is but one translation:

May thy continued mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend thy Church; and because, without thee, she cannot keep safe, may she be always governed by thy gift.  Through.

And here it is the 2010 English Missal (CTS new daily missal, p. 1384):

May your unfailing compassion, O Lord,cleanse and protect your Church,and, since without you she cannot stand secure, may she be always governed by your grace.  Through.

It is there in the 1979 Book of common prayer, too, where it appears on pp. 180 and 232 as Proper 13:

O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church, and, because it cannot continue in safety without they succor, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through.

Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through.

In the earlier Books of common prayer and the Sarum missal (which adds the quæsumus) it is assigned to the 16th Sunday after Trinity:

[1549:]  Lord, we beseche thee, let thy continual pitie clense and defende thy congregacion; and, because it cannot continue in safetie without thy succoure, preserue it euermore by thy helpe and goodnes.

[1662:]  O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy church; and because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness.

(According to Hatchett, p. 190, the substitution of "church" for "congregacion" was an anti-Puritan move.) 

"In aristocracies the observance of forms was superstitious; among us they ought to be kept up with a deliberate and enlightened deference."

"Dans les aristocraties, on avait la superstition des formes; il faut que nous ayons un culte éclairé et réfléchi pour elles."

     Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America II (1840).iv.7 ("Continuation of the preceding chapters"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol. 2, p. 326); Œuvres, ed. André Jardin (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), II (De la démocratie en Amérique), ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer (Paris:  Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 845.  "If the statesmen of aristocratic ages could sometimes despise forms with impunity and frequently rise above them, the statesmen to whom the government of nations is now confided ought to treat the very least among them with respect and not neglect them without imperious necessity" (326).  This because though they are crucial to the preservation of liberty in a democracy, "Men living in democratic ages do not readily comprehend the utility of forms:  they feel an instinctive contempt for them" (325).

"May we keep our bodies pure, / as temples of the Holy Spirit."

Tríbue nos córpora nostra incontamináta serváre,
ut possit Spíritus Sanctus illic habitáre.

Make it possible for us to keep our bodies undefiled,
that the Holy Spirit may be able to dwell in them.

     From the prayer (prex, not oratio) for the Second Saturday of Lent, Liturgia horarum / Liturgy of the hours (Christian prayer, 312).  Preliminary indications are that this one isn't ancient.
     This is consistent with the common-sense (and therefore far from merely pietistic or holiness) interpretation of 1 Cor 6:12-20:  "Do you not know that your bodies are members [(τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν μέλη . . . ἐστιν)] of Christ?"  And that despite the singular nouns (though not pronouns) of vv. 19-20 (τὸ σῶμα, ναὸς).  Cf., for example, Gordon D. Fee, who follows Gundry contra Kempthorne:  "In referring to the body as the temple of the Spirit, Paul has taken the imagery that properly belongs to the church as a whole (cf. 3:16; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:21-22) and applied it to the individual believer" (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 1987), 264).
     Nonetheless incontaminat*, at least, does not occur in 1 Cor 6, or anywhere else of close relevance in the Vulgate (2 Mac 15:34; 2 Cor 7:11; and 1 Pet 1:4, 19 only, if the ARTFL version of the Vulgate is any indication).

The Breastplate or Lorica of St. Patrick (Fáeth Fiada)

Trinity College Dublin MS 1441, fol. 19v

Atomeriug indíu

niurt trén togairm trinoit

cretim treodataid

fóisin óeridatad

in dúlemain dail. . . .

But it probably wasn't composed by St. Patrick (ODCC, 3rd ed., rev. (2005):  "its ascription to St. Patrick is impossible on linguistic grounds").

     Critical editions of the original (early 8th-century) Old Irish:

• Bernard, J. H. & R. Atkinson, eds. The Irish Liber Hymnorum.   Henry Bradshaw Society 13–14.

• Vol. 1 (1897), pp. 133–136: Old Irish.

• Vol. 2 (1897), pp. 49–51: English.

• Vol. 2 (1897), pp. 208–212: notes.

• Stokes, Whitley, & John Strachan, eds. Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: a collection of Old-Irish glosses scholia prose and verse.  Vol. 2, Non-biblical glosses and scholia, Old-Irish prose, names of persons and places, inscriptions, verse, indexes (1903), pp. 354-358.  Bieler (below) called this in 1953 "the most accurate [translation] in existence" (68).

     Manuscripts (in progress):

• c. 1000:  Dublin:  Trinity College Manuscripts and Archives Research Library TCD MS 1441, formerly E.4.2 (and other shelfmarks listed at the link).  Digitization here (the Lorica covers fol. 19v-20r).
• 15th/16th cent.:  Oxford:  Bodleian Library MS Rawl B 512.
• 15th/16th cent:  London:  British Library Egerton MS 93.

     Additional translations into English (in progress):

• Bieler, Ludwig, trans.  The works of St. Patrick; St. Secundinus, Hymn on St. Patrick.  Ancient Christian writers 17.  New York:  Paulist Press, 1953.  Pp. 67-72.
• Stokes, Whitley, trans. (above).  Reprinted in J. H. Todd, St. Patrick, apostle of Ireland (1864), 426-429.  Cf. this with the translation in Whitley & Strachan (which Bieler in 1953 called "the most accurate [translation] in existence"), above.
• Petrie, George.  "On the history and antiquities of Tara Hill."  Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 18.Antiquities (1839):  56-68 (25-232).  The Breastplate or Lorica of St. Patrick was first published here in 1839.

     Additional bibliography (in progress):

• Watson, J. R.  "I bind unto myself today."  Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology.
• Binchy, D. A. "Varia III.3. Atomriug-4. The date of the so-called 'Hymn of Patrick.'"  Ériu 20 (1966):  232–237 (229-237).  This is the work of scholarship on which the ODCC grounds its claim that St. Patrick could not have been the author.

The importance of equality and uniformity to the centralization of power

     "Every central power, which follows its natural tendencies, courts and encourages the principle of equality [(l'égalité)]; for equality singularly facilitates, extends, and secures the influence of a central power.
     "In like manner it may be said that every central government worships uniformity [(l'uniformité)]; uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details, which must be attended to if rules have to be adapted to different men, instead of indiscriminately subjecting all men to the same rule [(s'il fallait faire la règle pour les hommes, au lieu de faire passer indistinctement tous les hommes sous la même règle)]."

     Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America II (1840).iv.3 ("That the sentiments of democratic nations accord with their opinions in leading them to concentrate political power"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol. 2, p. 295); Œuvres, ed. André Jardin (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), II (De la démocratie en Amérique), ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer (Paris:  Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 814.
     These two paragraphs on the tendency of democratic states to arrogate to themselves all power, destroy all mediating institutions, and reach ever further into the private lives of their citizens, refer only obliquely (via the gloss "different men") to another major theme of these chapters:  that only aristocracies oppose these tendencies naturally (rather than artificially, i.e. by design or art).  For only aristocracies are naturally equipped to treat different things differently.
     But of course Tocqueville's "chief object in writing this book has been to combat [such tendencies]" (vol. 2, p. 293), not obstruct the progress of democracy; and thus to stress "that, in the democratic ages which are opening upon us, individual independence and local liberties will ever be the products of art" (296).  Because "no legislator is wise or powerful enough to preserve free institutions if he does not take equality for his first principle and his watchword", "the question is not how to reconstruct aristocratic society, but how to make liberty proceed out of that democratic state of society in which God has placed us" (322).  The applicability of that statement is there limited to "the ages upon which we are entering" ("dans les siècles où nous entrons", 322/840), but on p. 324/842 Tocqueville seems to go further:  "I firmly believe that an aristocracy cannot again be founded in the world" ("Je crois fermement qu'on ne saurait fonder de nouveau, dans le monde, une aristocratie").
     Yet doesn't the first of Tocqueville's checks (324.1) open the door to what we know today as the professional lobbyists?

"If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition."

     "Si l'Amérique éprouve jamais de grandes révolutions, elles seront amenées par la présence des Noirs sur le sol des États-Unis:  c'est-à-dire que ce ne sera pas l'égalité des conditions, mais au contraire leur inégalité qui les fera naître."

     Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America II (1840). iii.21 ("Why revolutions will become more rare"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol. 2, p. 256); Œuvres, ed. André Jardin (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), II (De la démocratie en Amérique), ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer (Paris:  Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 774.
     In this chapter, Tocqueville argues against the supposition "that some concealed relation and secret tie exists between the principle of equality itself and revolution" (251) and in favor of the claim that "Almost all the revolutions that have changed the aspect of nations have been made to consolidate or to destroy social inequality" (252).  "Amid the ruins which surround me shall I dare say that revolutions are not what I most fear for coming generations?" (262)

Bogus Tubman: “I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.”

Harriet Tubman, as quoted (but without a citation) in

1993:  My soul looks back, 'less I forget:  a collection of quotations by people of color, ed. Dorothy Winbush Riley (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 148.  My thanks to Quote Investigator Dr. Garson O'Toole for supplying this one in a note via email dated 18 March 2014.  Riley substitutes a comma for the first period, and gives a date of "c. 1865".  She died in 2012.

1999:  Africana: the encyclopedia of the African and African American experience, 1^st ed., ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & Anthony Appiah (New York:  Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 299 (“Free blacks in the United States,” by Alonford James Robinson, Jr.); and 2^nd ed., ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & Anthony Appiah (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2005), vol. 2, p. 710 (“Free blacks in the United States,” by Alonford James Robinson, Jr.).

Unfortunately, the attribution to Tubman is in all likelihood bogus, and for a number of reasons:

First, neither Riley nor Robinson cites a source.  What is more, neither of the indices to the two books listed in Robinson's little bibliography contains an entry for Tubman.

Second, the idea that Tubman freed “thousands” of slaves (for example the “several thousand” referred to in Economic co-operation among Negro Americans:  a social study made by Atlanta University under the patronage of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., together with the Proceedings of the 12^th Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, held at Atlanta University, on Tuesday, May the 28^th, 1907, ed. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (Atlanta, GA:  The Atlanta University Press, 1907), 30, as quoted by Sernett (64), below) has been discredited by the professional Tubman scholarship of the early to mid-2000s, which questioned not “thousands”, but even the three hundred “first introduced” by Tubman contemporary and biographer Sarah H. Bradford (Sernett, 64 ff.).  Tubman specialists (and admirers) Drs. Jean H. Humez (“sixty-six to seventy-seven” (352 and elsewhere)), Kate Clifford Larson (“roughly seventy to eighty slaves, in addition to perhaps fifty or sixty more to whom she gave detailed instructions” (100)), and Milton C. Sernett (pp. 64 ff., 304, 309, 315, 317, 321-323, and so forth) agree in an estimate of approximately seventy, most of them relatives.  (2021 November 29:  This figure must not include the number of those freed by the Combahee Ferry/River Raid of 2 June 1863 alone, however (between 725 and 840 according to Larson, 366n71).)

Third, the conditional clause (“If they had known they were slaves”) seems anachronistic, much better suited to a later and less overtly racist age, perhaps even (see “Fourth,” below) the mid to  late twentieth century.  Would it really have been possible for an antebellum slave (as distinguished from, say, a Jim-Crow-era African American) to have been unaware (or in denial) of the fact that she was a slave?  (An honest question, but one that, it seems to me, must be posed.  Needless to say, I am not the one to make an educated guess about the period of African American history into which such a "lived experience" or mentalité might most comfortably fit.)

Fourth, it makes no attempt to reproduce the dialect in which (if genuine) it would probably have been delivered, despite the fact that such attempts are present in the 19^th-century sources (just for example those collected at Humez 195 ff. and 277 ff.).

Fifth, I, at least, have yet to identify a pre-1993 source that puts these words in Tubman’s mouth.  Humez thinks it could turn up in the juvenile literature of the twentieth century (note to Steve Perisho dated 13 March 2014), but even if it were to turn up (and I would love to hear of any findings), see numbers two and three above.

Sixth, the Tubman specialists I’ve written think it spurious.  Humez is skeptical:  “Certainly I never ran across such a claim in the early sources” (note sent via email, above, and quoted here with permission).  Larson is even more emphatic:

Harriet Tubman never said this. As you discovered . . . , there is no citation for this - it is made up.  It first starts appearing around 2000 (coincides with the Africana encyclopedia) and then every year it seems to be used with more frequency.  I am glad to know it did not sound right to you. I just don't get why people use this quote without questioning it. It doesn't sound like something Tubman would say. . . . I find it racist, frankly.  Don't you think every enslaved person knew they were slaves?  They certainly did.  It also diminishes the very real and complicated decision-making process that went into a freedom seeker's decision to flee if they could indeed do so. The quote does not reflect the very real anguish of enslaved people who did flee and left all their loved ones behind, and the pain experienced by those who were left behind.  Tubman understood those feelings and that decision process acutely, and she carried it deeply within her soul

(note to Steve Perisho dated 13 March 2014, and quoted here with permission).

Bibliography:

• Humez, Jean M.  Harriet Tubman:  the life and the life stories.  Wisconsin studies in autobiography series.  Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
• Larson, Kate Clifford.  Bound for the promised land:  Harriet Tubman, portrait of an American hero.  New York, NY:  Ballantine Books, 2004.
• Luker, Ralph E.  "Pimpin' out Harriet Tubman."  History News Network, 13 February 2008.  I hadn't encountered this by the time I composed the post above, which I did so that there would be a debunking readily accessible via the Internet.  Undoubtedly this was because I was looking for debunkings of the statement as it had appeared in print in 1993.  Whereas Robin Morgan reproduced it on 2 February 2008 as follows:  "Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, 'I could have saved thousands—if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.'"
• Popick, Barry.  The Big Apple.  21 April 2016.  This was published over two years after my post above, and cites it (as well as my Wikiquote modification), but cites also a page quoting Sernett (below) that I apparently missed at the time, as well as an undated one by Larson (above).
• Sernett, Milton C.  Harriet Tubman:  myth, memory, and history.  Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2007.