"I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well."

Hat tip Elaine Butler.

"Ich habe fleißig seyn müssen; wer eben so fleißig ist, der wird es eben so weit bringen können."

     Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), as channeled by Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749-1818), Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke. Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst (Leipzig:  Hoffmeister und Kuehnel, 1802), 45 (chap. 8).  Another translation:

"I was made to work; if you are equally industrious you will be equally successful."

I've seen also

"I had to be industrious. . . ."

Super oblata, Third Sunday of Advent

Diocesi di Novara

"May the sacrifice of our worship, Lord, we pray, be offered to you unceasingly, to complete what was begun in sacred mystery and powerfully accomplish for us your saving work.  Through."

"Devotionis nostrae tibi, Domine, quaesumus, hostia iugiter immolentur, quae et sacri peragat instituta mysterii et salutare tuum nobis potenter operetur.  Per."

"Devotionis nostrae tibi, quaesumus, domine, hostia iugiter immolentur, quae et sacri peragat instituta mysterii et salutare tuum nobis potenter operetur.  Per."

May the sacrifice of our devotion/consecration—which both accomplishes the aims of/instructions (words of institution) governing the sacred mystery, and powerfully effects for us your salvation—O Lord, we pray, be offered to you unceasingly.

     Super oblata, Third Sunday of Advent, Roman Missal.  =Corpus orationum 2221, a prayer already present (but with—as here—potentur rather than mirabiliter) in the Leonine or Veronese sacramentary, and, according to the 1956 edition of the latter edited by Mohlberg, dated by the scholars to between 432/481 and 557/560 (or slightly after 560), depending (group numbers 23, 25, 51, 68 and 77 from p. LXIX).  Devotio can mean a devoting or consecrating, a self-sacrifice or offering, and instituta, purposes, intentions, designs, and/or plans, but also the regulations, ordinances, institutions, and/or instructions designed to ensure their accomplishment.  For some recent additional thoughts, see also Fr. Z.

"Churches without people, people without priests, priests without the reverence due to them, and Christians without Christ."

"Basilicae sine plebibus, plebes sine sacerdotibus, sacerdotes sine debita reverentia sunt, et sine Christo denique Christiani."

     St. Bernard, Letter 317.1 to Alphonsus, Count of St. Gilles, concerning the heretic Henry, trans. Bruno Scott James (Letters of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (Chicago:  Henry Regnery Company, 1953), 388 (387-389)).  Latin from PL 182, col. 434 (for now).  317.2:

Unhappy people!  At the voice of one heretic you close your ears to all the Prophets and Apostles who with one Spirit of truth have brought together the Church out of all nations to one faith in Christ.

"the historicity of our contemporary options"

 "God is still a reference point for even the most untroubled unbelievers, because he helps define the temptation you have to overcome and set aside to rise to the heights of rationality on which they dwell. . . .

     ". . . [And so,] there are serious reasons to doubt whether [this utterly Godless society] could exist. . . . [For] the interesting issue is whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view which is being negated.  A condition of absence of religion which would no longer deserve the name unbelief.  If so, it would be different from our present world in one crucial respect.  Unbelief for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers, is understood as an achievement of rationality.  It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness.  It is a condition which can't only be described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense:  a condition of 'having overcome' the irrationality of belief.  It is this perfect-tensed consciousness which underlies unbelievers' use of 'disenchantment' today.  It is difficult to imagine a world in which this consciousness might have disappeared.

     ". . . in a similar way, the founding importance of the exclusive humanism of freedom, discipline, and beneficent order remains ineradicable in our present world.  Other modes of unbelief—as well as many forms of belief—understand themselves as having overcome or refuted it.  The whole Nietzschean stream is a case in point, depending as it does on seeing the filiation between Christian belief and beneficent order, and then defining itself against both."

     Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 268-269, italics mine.  This point is made again on pp. 591-592:

the very self-understanding of unbelief, that whereby it can present itself as mature, courageous, as a conquest over the temptations of childishness, dependency or lesser fortitude, requires that we remain aware of the vanquished enemy, of the obstacles which have to be climbed over, of the dangers which still await those whose brave self-reponsibility falters.  Faith has to remain a possibility, or else the self-valorizing understanding of atheism founders.  Imagining that faith might just disappear is imagining a fundamentally different form of non-faith, one quite unconnected to identity.  It would be one in which it would be as indifferent and unconnected to my sense of my ethical predicament that I have no faith, as it is today that I don't believe, for instance, in phlogiston, or natural places. . .

. . . Religion remains ineradicably on the horizon of areligion; and vice versa. . . . 

England the palimpset

 "Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from deep cold wells. It’s not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it’s those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing in the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges; the bones under your floor. You cannot tax them or count them. They have lasted ten thousand years and ten thousand before that. They are not easily dispossessed by farmers with fresh leases and law clerks who adduce proof of title. They bubble out of the ground, wear away the shoreline, sow weeds among the crops and erode the workings of mines."

     Hilary Mantel, The mirror and the light, Wolf Hall trilogy 3 (London:  4th Estate, 2020), so far unverified.

"Go ye out to meet him and say"

Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, 390
(late 10th cent.), fol. 15

"Aspiciens a longe ecce video dei potentiam venientem et nebulam totam terram tegentem ite obviam ei et dicite nuntia nobis si tu es ipse qui regnaturus es in populo Israel."

     Responsory to the first reading (Isaiah 1:1-3) at Matins for the First Sunday of Advent, Divine office =Responsory to the second reading (St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. 15.1-3), Office of Readings, First Sunday of Advent, Liturgy of the hours.  According to the database CANTUS, this is present in manuscripts of the 9th-century (D-TRs 1245/597, F-Al 44) at least.  (But see now Hansjakob Becker, below, who attributes it to Pope Gregory I (540-604), or more generally the archetypical Old Roman and Gregorian periods (70), and for whom the 9th century is but the century in which the "Carolingians" Agobard of Lyon and Amalar of Metz tried to reform it out of existence.) 

"I look from afar, and behold I see the Power of God, coming like as a cloud to cover the land with the hosts of his People:  Go ye out to meet him and say:  Tell us if thou art he, That shalt reign over God's people Israel."

     Trans. Divinum Officium.  A version of this by Palestrina, as sung at Salisbury.

     According to Hans-Jakob Becker ("Aspeciens - Aspiciebam.  Tradition and transformation des Antiphonale officii im Mittelalter," in Crossroad of cultures:  studies in liturgy and patristics in honor of Gabriele Winkler, ed. Hans-Jürgen Feulner, Elena Velkovska, and Robert F. Taft, S.J., Orientalia christiana analecta 260 (Rome:  Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2000), 70-71 (69-88)), this Response—which is, "In the antiphonaries and breviaries of all [of the ancient] churches and monasteries" (excepting only (?) those of the [ancient] Milanese tradition, which attaches it, i.e. its "Qui regnis" only, to the Third), "the first in the series attached to the [(des)] First Sunday of Advent—is a cento, i.e. "a patchwork poem made up of verses by different writers" (J. A. Cuddon, A dictionary of literary terms (1977)).  "It is an example of the poetic Response, i.e. of that art of new creation in accordance with which the poet neither takes his text literally from Scripture, nor composes [it] with complete freedom, but, living [himself] wholly within the thought and imagery of the Bible, expresses what he wants to say with the words [(with fragments)] of Scripture, thus allowing [(wobei)] a given keyword to effect an [(die)] association, and bind the various passages together" (Becker, again, citing, at 71n14, a number of previous studies of this sort of liturgical "centonizzazione").  Here, according to Becker (71)—who is an incalculable improvement on the post-Vatican II Liturgia horarum, which suggests for this first stanza only Ps 49 (50):3, let alone Battifol (who suggested Aeschylus' The Persians!)—are the sources of these opening lines.  (To which I might add Mt 11:3.)

Responsorium	Schriftstelle	Vulgata [English from Douay-Rheims]
Aspiciens a longe	Heb 11:13; cf. Dan 7:13, Aspiciebam ergo in visione noctis, et ecce cum nubibus caeli quasi filius hominis veniebat, I beheld therefore in the vision of the night, and lo, one like the son of man came with the clouds of heaven	defuncti sunt … isti … a longe eas aspicientes [All these died … beholding them afar off]
ecce video	Acts 7:55	Ecce video caelos apertos [Behold, I see the heavens opened]
Dei potentiam venientem	Ps 79 (80):3	Excita potentiam tuam et veni [Stir up thy might, and come]
et nebulam totam terram tegentem	Sir 24:6	sicut nebula texi omnem terram [as a cloud I covered all the earth]
Ite obviam ei	Mt 25:6	sponsus venit, exite obviam ei [the bridegroom cometh, go ye forth to meet him]
et dicite	Lk 7:20	Joannes … misit nos ad te dicens [John … hath sent us to thee, saying]
Nuntia nobis	Lk 7:22	Euntes renuntiate Joanni [Go and relate to John]
sit tu es ipse	Lk 7:20	Tu es qui venturus es [Art thou he that art to come]
qui regnaturus es in populo Israel	Mt 2:6; cf. Mic 5:2, ex te mihi egredietur qui sit dominator in Israel, out of thee shall he come forth unto me [he] that is to be the ruler in Israel	exiet dux, qui regnat populum meum Israel [shall come forth the captain that shall rule my people Israel]

Needless to say, all of this was considered unacceptably "extravant" by reformers of the Carolingian period such as Amolar and Agobard, as Becker goes on, in the rest of his article, to show, a judgment which leads to various traditions of the exclusion of the Aspiciens a longe, along with the substitution for it, "in all sources in which the Aspiciens is lacking" (83), of the supposedly more strictly biblical Aspiciebam of Dan 7:13.

     That said, Amalar and Agobard "were decisive for the [subsequent] tradition in only the small [(kleinen)] sphere of Type 12" and the neo-Gallican (and profoundly Abogardian) Breviarum Parisiense of 1736.  As for the post-Vatican II Liturgia horarum, it reverences, supposedly, both Agobard and the "archetypical" tradition of the Aspiciens a longe (above) simultaneously (87-88):

The order of hourly prayer that appeared after the Second Vatican Council reacted against [both] the [archetypical] tradition and [the reform-inspired] transformations of the [Carolingian] Middle Ages.  Since the Officium Lectionis allows for only two readings, the first biblical, the second patristic, only two Responses are needed for each day.  A glance at the First Week of Advent shows that the first Response, the Lavamini, was basically composed afresh, and indeed in direct textual reference to the preceding lectio continua [(Bahnlesung)] from Isaiah.  The second Response allows for the possibility of bringing texts of the tradition into play.  And so[, in sum,] the First Sunday of Advent is opened with a new Response answering to Is 1, whereas the Response Aspiciens, which was rejected in Types 12 and 43 as well as in the neo-Gallican tradition as unbiblical, is found as the second Response (!) at the conclusion of the reading from the Fathers:  a reverence for Agobard and, simultaneously, a reverence for the tradition [both].

"a glittering cargo cult"

emilyfoxgordon.com

      "If [at 72] I were to take a religious turn, it would be toward Christianity.  But strait is the gate and narrow is the way.  In order to pass through, I’d have to shrink myself to the size of the child I was before I knew better than to believe.  How would I do that, and what would be left of me?"

     Emily Fox Gordon, "An atheist’s lament," The American scholar 90, no. 1 (Winter 2021):  85 (78-85).