"I have often heard of God's house but I never saw his barn before."

     A "new arrival" at the sight of "the first church building in [Chicago]," the Presbyterian meeting house built on Clark Street in 1834, in Edwin O. Gale, Reminiscences of early Chicago and vicinity (Chicago:  Revell, 1902), 361.  I was put onto this by Richard Kieckhefer, Theology in stone:  church architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 201.
     Though I'm certainly no fan of ugly churches, somebody should probably have reminded this wag of a certain manger (φάτνη).

Were all the kings on earth to show | their greatest pomp and power | the smallest leaf they could not grow, | nor graft it on a flower.

Gik alle konger frem på rad
i deres magt og vælde,
de mægted ej det mindste blad
at sætte på en nælde.

     Hans Adolph Brorson, Salme 15, "Op, al den ting, som Gud har gjort" (1734), trans. Edward Broadbridge, for (supposedly) Hymns in English:  a selection of hymns from The Danish hymnbook (Copenhagen:  Det Kgl. Vajsenhus; [Frederiksberg]:  I samarbejde med Folkekirkens mellemkirkelige Råd, 2009).

The superficiality of the forgiveness of self

"The 'pagans' know the examination of conscience, [which] consists in scrutinizing oneself in the light of norms, [an] exercise that permits, in fact, a correction and a therapy of the passions of the soul (anger, pride, . . .).  But that 'practice of self' is envisaged by Basil of Caesarea through a parable of Scripture, which imparts a new dimension to the examination of conscience:  'God, be merciful to me a sinner!'  The appeal to the divine mercy is unknown in such spiritual exercises among the pagans, the 'me' of whom is, in a sense, the seat of salvation, of self-justification, [the seat] of a pardon that one offers oneself [(pardon auto-addressé)].  One would do well to compare the paragraph from Basil [(above)] with another from Seneca:  'I avail myself of this privilege, and every day I plead my cause before the bar of self.  When the light has been removed from sight, and my wife . . . has become silent, I scan the whole of my day and retrace all my deeds and words.  I conceal nothing from myself, I omit nothing.  For why should I shrink from any of my mistakes, when I may commune thus with myself?  "See that you never do that again; I will pardon you this time"' (De ira III.36.3-4[, trans. Basore]).  The Christian here takes leave of the habits of the [pagan] philosopher, in order to take up those of the publican of the Gospel, who awaits the pardon of a God who transcends the 'self'.  For, for Basil and his coreligionists, the tribunal of conscience is no longer the temporary jurisdiction of this world, which has not in itself the means of salvation.  If the orator [of the Basilean homily on Dt 15:9] is [a] debtor to the culture of the schools, and to its modes of discourse, one cannot for that reason neglect the important inflections imparted by him to this motif of profane origin.  The prosochè is integrated by Basil of Caesarea into a new context, which is no longer at all that of Stoic self-transfiguration.  This effort of the soul to be in conformity with itself, to compel itself [(se laisser)] to be guided by norms, takes on a renewed meaning in [the context of] a life conceived of and experienced henceforth as [one] fought over between God and the devil.  The prosuchè takes the shape of [a] technique of moral survival in fear of the [Last] Judgment and the hope of salvation. . . .  One has therefore to do with an assimilation on many levels:  Deuteronomy is read through profane philosophy to be sure, but profane philosophy is itself recontextualized within the framework of the Christian drama and eschatology.

     ". . . In the ethical order as in the gnoseological, Basil of Caesarea de-centers the prescription of the narrow frame of the little theatre of the 'self' by [means of] a superior comprehension of what the self is:  a creature who owes himself to [(se doit à)] God, whom he can know and love as his Creator and Benefactor, and whom he must fear [(redouter)] as his Judge."

     Arnaud Perrot, "L'attention à soi-même chez Basile de Césarée," Communio:  revue catholique internationale 40, no. 5 (sep-oct 2015):  35-37 (27-37).

Give me [not] thine hand?

"a catholic spirit is not speculative latitudinarianism.  It is not indifference to all opinions.  This is the spawn of hell, not the offering of heaven.  This unsettledness of thought, this being 'driven to and fro, and tossed about with every wind of doctrine' [(Eph 4:14)], is a great curse, not a blessing; an irreconcilable enemy, not a friend, to true catholicism.  A man of a truly catholic spirit has not now his religion to seek.  He is fixed as the sun in his judgment concerning the main branches of Christian doctrine.  'Tis true he is always ready to hear and weigh whatsoever can be offered against his principles.  But as this does not show any wavering in his own mind, so neither does it occasion any.  He does not halt between two opinions [(1 Kg 18:21)], nor vainly endeavor to blend them into one.  Observe this, you who know not what spirit ye are of [(Lk 9:55 AV)], who call yourselves men of a catholic spirit only because you are of a muddy understanding; because your mind is all in a mist; because you have no settled, consistent principles, but are for jumbling all opinions together.  Be convinced that you have quite missed your way:  you know not where you are.  You think you are got into the very spirit of Christ [(Rom 8:9)], when in truth you are nearer the spirit of antichrist [(1 Jn 4:3)].  Go first and learn [(Mt 9:13)] the first elements of the gospel of Christ [(Heb 5:12)], and then shall you learn to be of a truly catholic spirit."

     John Wesley, "Catholic spirit" (Sermon 39) III.1, underscoring mine.  In III.2 Wesley then moves on to the rejection of "any kind of practical latitudinarianism"; in III.3, to that of "indifference to all congregations"; and so forth.

• 1 Ki 18:21:  between the Lord and Baal!
• Lk 9:55 AV, i.e. as present in some manuscripts:  "But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of."  Cf. Mk 8:33 on the "Satan"ism of a rebuked Peter, along with the several other passages in which Jesus "rebukes" an ultimately spiritual adversary.
• Rom 8:9:  "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his" (AV).
• 1 John 4:3:  the speculative latitudinarian is here being accused of, in effect, denying "that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh", "that Jesus is the Christ", etc.  For "antichrist" language occurs only in 1 (and 2) John, the epistle that, for Rob Wall, constituted Wesley's "canon within the canon" (Robert W. Wall, "John’s John: a Wesleyan theological reading of 1 John," Wesleyan theological journal 46, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 105–41).
• "spawn of hell":  to cite Mt 23:15 in conjunction with this would be to push things too far, though it would be interesting to know what, more precisely, that phrase served to denominate in Wesley's time.

Thus, the speculative latitudinarian (as here described, to a greater or a lesser extent, of course, also a specifically 18th-century figure) should be understood to be (or so it seems to me) among those to whom Wesley would extend not the hand of a specifically Christian fellowship, but only, at most, the "strong and cordial affection"—the "universal love"—due even to one's "enemies" (III.4, though even there—i.e. in sec. III more generally, but III.4-6 more specifically—the context seems to be still an at least nominally "Christian" one).  Cf. the reference to taking "this word in the strictest sense" at the head of III.5.

"a metaphysics of conjoined attention"

"the man who strives to attend [(s’efforce à l’attention)] rejoins the harmonious whole of th[ose] other created minds for whom attention is less difficult, indeed spontaneous, and God himself, in the grasp of the one theoretical and practical reality, of the true and the good.  One finds oneself here at the heart of very contemporary questions about attention conjoined or shared [(l'attention conjointe ou partagée)], [a heart] that radically modifies the conceptual terrain of the question of attention, dislodge[s it] from a posture purely egological, or purely dyadic, in order to situate it within the [whole] system of encounters with others and with the world.  In the ethics of Malebranche, . . . attention serves less to grasp the divine will that man must discern in particular situations than to see the general order-of-perfection of things [(l’ordre general de perfection des choses)].  And, in the realm [(temps)] of thought and of reason in every case (outside of faith in a religious revelation), it is from this correct grasp of the ordination of things in accordance with their perfection that the human will is called to rejoin the movements of preference, choice, attachment, and regard as executed by all minds and once again God himself infallibly and uniformly.  One has here then a metaphysics of conjoined attention [(une métaphysique de l'attention conjointe)].  The moral life would be [then] nothing other than the life oriented, like that of God, towards God himself.  Philosophical by consequence on this way of reason, the ethics of Malebranche is, like the whole of his thought, [nevertheless] radically religious, in the precise, trans-Jansenist sense of a rational confidence in the love of a God who guarantees the solidity ([solidité,] a term very frequent in Malebranche), that is to say the maintenance in being, of entities fragile and inconstant, but whose capacity for attention is a finite thread that, by grace, holds them in union with the Infinite."

     Michel Dupuis, "L'attention et l'amour de l'Ordre dans la morale de Malebranche," L'attention au XVIIe siècle:  conceptions et usages =Les études philosophiques 2017, no. 1 (2017):  70-71 (59-71).

The most precious goods must not be sought, but awaited

     "We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.  Man cannot discover them by his own powers and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern the falsity."

     Simone Weil, "Reflections on the right use of school studies with a view to the love of God," in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1951), 56-57.

     "Les biens les plus précieux ne doivent pas être cherchés, mais attendus.  Car l'homme ne peut pas les trouver par ses propres forces, et s'il se met à leur recherche, il trouvera à la place des faux biens dont il ne saura pas discerner la fausseté."

     The most precious goods must not be sought, but awaited.  For man cannot find them by his own powers, and if he puts himself onto the search for them, he will find instead only false goods, the falsity of which he will be unable to discern.

"And Thou hast freely given | what earth could never buy, | The bread of life from heaven, | That now I shall not die"

     Johann Rist, "Wie wohl hast du gelabet," stanza 2, as trans. Catherine Winkworth, in "O Living Bread from Heaven, in Lyra Germanica (London:  George Newnes Limited; New York:  Charles Scribener's Sons, 1855), 283-286.  The original:  Neuer himmlischer Lieder (1651), 76-81.  See also Hymnary.org.