"No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library."

     "No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library.  Oxford, Harvard, Columbia, California are great citadels of truth and freedom, where books and people and ideas are nobly joined.  When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end."

     Lawrence Clark Powell, "The heart of a university:  its library:  'A sacred place where the world's ideas are concentrated,'" University bulletin:  a weekly bulletin for the staff of the University of California 5, no. 26 (February 11, 1947), 127 (126-127).

"God does not allow his servants to embrace his prohibition against murder while rejecting his teaching about adultery or fornication."

"Jesus’ point in [Matthew] 5:19 is the same as that of other Bible teachers in his day:  one cannot pick and choose among the commandments but must obey them all.  As some teachers put it, one should be as 'careful with regard to a light commandment as . . . with a heavy one. . . .' . . . God does not allow his servants to embrace his prohibition against murder while rejecting his teaching about adultery or fornication."

     Craig S. Keener, A commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 1999), 179.  Or anything lighter, for example "the 'least' commandment about the bird's nest (Dt 22:6-7)"?

Nicely put

"we do indeed understand ourselves as a Christian community. Our statement of Core Values refers to Regent College as at its heart 'a community of Christian scholars,' aiming 'not simply to be informed by study but also to be transformed by the Holy Spirit through study, to the end that we might become more Christ-like and therefore more fully human.' Into this continuing community we welcome our students, who are sojourners within it. They are invited to join us for a time in the hope that our curriculum 'will establish them in the evangelical tradition' and 'deepen their faith and theological understanding.'"

     Regent College, Vancouver, "Moral vision" 2, under "Theological position" (underscoring and italics mine), accessed 13 February 2020.

"Nations do not die from invasion, they die from internal rottenness."

wisconsinhistory.org

     Jenkin Lloyd Jones, "Why love Russia," in Love for the battle-torn peoples:  sermon-studies . . . for the reinforcement of faith (Chicago:  Unity Publishing Company, 1916), 115.

     Though Abraham Lincoln gave voice to similar convictions, the very sentence in question was composed by the Unitarian minister Jenkin Lloyd Jones, not Lincoln. This is clear from the typesetting in context.  It is also clear from the fact that the noun "rottenness" does not occur anywhere in the standard 1953 Collected works of Abraham Lincoln online (which, however, does not appear to include the first (1974) and second (1990) supplements).  (The noun "invasion" occurs, but in no comparable context.)

     Also, the words of Lincoln with which Jones ends that same paragraph run not "If our republic ever dies, it will die from suicide, from degeneracy" but "As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."  Indeed, the noun "degeneracy" occurs only in the letter to Joshua F. Speed dated 24 August 1855:

I am not a Know-Nothing.  That is certain.  How could I be?  How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?  Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.  As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.'  We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.'  When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.'

     But from those words alone it should be obvious that, as I've already said, Lincoln gave voice to similar convictions.  Indeed, the entire thrust of the speech under discussion here, the "Address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois" delivered on 27 January 1838, is perfectly consistent with the summary provided by Jones, the instrument of the death by suicide that Lincoln warns against—"if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.  It cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher"—being, in that case, the "mobocratic spirit", i.e.

the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgement of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.

     Abraham Lincoln:  speeches and writings, 1832-1858:  speeches, letters, and miscellaneous writings, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, [edited and] annotated by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York:  The Library of America, 1989), 31, 29;  Letter to Joshua F. Speed:  363 (360-363)).  (The Library of America edition is based on the 1953 edition edited by Basler (above), but corrects it where necessary.)

     Some low-hanging scholarship (articles) on the speech (most to least recent, in progress).  Note—on, at least potentially, the broader theme of internal degeneration—especially Wilson and Howe (which I haven't yet read):

• Ray, Angela G. "Learning Leadership: Lincoln at the Lyceum, 1838." Rhetoric & Public affairs 13, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 349–87.
• Fornieri, Joseph R. "Washington’s Farewell Address and Lincoln’s Lyceum Address." White House Studies 5, no. 3 (April 2005): 365–82.
• Wilson, Major L. "Lincoln on the Perpetuation of Republican Institutions: Whig and Republican Strategies." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 16, no. 1 (January 1995): 15–25.
• Howe, Daniel Walker. "Why Abraham Lincoln Was a Whig." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 16, no. 1 (January 1995): 27–38.
• Schwartz, Thomas F. "The Springfield Lyceums and Lincoln’s 1838 Speech." Illinois Historical Journal 83, no. 1 (January 1990): 45–49.
• Schmitz, Neil. "Murdered Mcintosh, Murdered Lovejoy: Abraham Lincoln and the Problem of Jacksonian Address." Arizona Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 15–39.

Refuse to be "intimidated by claims about the relativism of interpretation"

"When people talk about Scripture and divine revelation, it's all about interpretation:  You've got your interpretation.  I've got my interpretation.  And then you develop a set of buckets or whatever set of images you've got.

"Here is where we must stand firm.  When God speaks to us in Scripture, God is not incompetent.  When he says 'yes,' we understand it.  When he says 'no,' we can understand it.  And otherwise we've got a totally incompetent deity.  We have a God who didn't make us in such a way [that] we can hear him and understand him, and when he speaks to us in his word, he can't get through to us.  That's not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And that's why we're not intimidated by claims about the relativism of interpretation.

"God is not incompetent.  He's spoken to us and we're going to stand by the revelation that's given in Scripture."

     William J. Abraham, address to the Fourth Global Gathering of the Wesleyan Covenant Association, as reproduced in "Turning point," Good news:  leading United Methodists to a faithful future, January/February 2020, 19 (18-20).  Cf. this.

Harvard's List Professor of Jewish Studies on inclusive language for Jesus Christ

Source:  Harvard Divinity School

"Imagine:  in an institution once explicitly and formally Christian and still culturally so, largely dedicated to the education of ministers, one can deny with utter impunity that Jesus was born of a virgin or raised from the dead.  But if one says that he was the son of God the father, one runs afoul of the institution’s deepest commitments.  If the ancient christological confession is to be retained at all—and this, presumably, is only a matter of personal preference—it must be recast in gender-neutral terms.  Though our dinner companion did not say so, I assume that the older formulation may still be employed for purposes of critique, to show the alleged androcentrism of the early church, but not for purposes of affirmation, at least not without an immediate qualification to the effect that the traditional language is a historically conditioned convention and an unhappy one at that."

     Jon D. Levenson, "Theological liberalism aborting itself," The Christian century 109, no. 5 (February 5-12, 1992):  139.

"Only a very determined thoughtlessness could believe what is now common opinion"

"Only a very determined thoughtlessness could believe what is now common opinion:  'What someone does in bed is not the law's business, so long as no one is hurt.'  On the contrary, what I do in bed is the area of my action in which the community has the most urgent interest, the area for which it must legislate if it is to legislate at all."

     Robert W. Jenson, Systematic theology, vol. 2, The works of God (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), 90.