"Grant that as we joyfully receive him for our Redeemer, so we may with sure confidence behold him when he shall come to be our Judge"

Rome, Vatic. Reg. Lat. 316,
fol. 169r

"D[eu]s qui nos redempcionis nostrae annua expectacione laetificas praesta ut unigenitum filium tuum quem redemptorem laeti suscipimus uenientem quoque iudicem securi uideamus; per"

"Deus, qui nos redemptionis nostrae annua exspectatione laetificas, praesta, ut unigenitum filium tuum, quem redemptorem laeti suscepimus, venientem quoque iudicem securi videamus."

     Alia oratio de Adentu Domini, Old Gelasian sacramentary no. 1156 (as ed. Mohlberg, Eizenhöfer, & Siffrin) =Rome, Vatic. Reg. Lat. 316, fol. 169r (bot)-169v (top), along with others of the 8th century (Gregorianum, Gellonensis, Prag, Rhenaugiensis), and many others afterwards, including, of course, that of Salisbury, according to Corpus orationum no. 1915 (cf. no. 1133) =Bruylants 410.

1549:  Collect, At the First Communion, Christmas Day, Booke of the common prayer:  "God, whiche makest us glad with the yerely remembraunce of the birth of thy onely sonne Jesus Christ; graunt that as we ioyfully receiue him for our redemer, so we may with sure confidence beholde hym, when he shall come to be our iudge, who liueth and reigneth &c."

1552:  Boke of common prayer:  dropped in favor of the Collect At the Second Communion only (Hatchett, 168).

[1568]:  Oratio, In Vigilia Nativitatis, Breviarium Romanum (as reprinted in 1945 by Benziger):  "Deus, qui nos redemptionis nostrae annua exspectatione laetificas:  praesta; ut Unigenitum tuum, quem Redemptorem laeti suscipimus, venientem quoque judicem securi videamus, D[omi]n[u]m nostrum Jesum Christum Filium tuum:  Qui"

[1570]:  Oratio, In Vigilia Nativitatis, Missale Romanum (as reprinted in 1949 by Sheed & Ward):  "Deus, qui nos redemptionis nostrae annua exspectatione laetificas:  praesta; ut Unigenitum tuum, quem Redemptorem laeti suscipimus, venientem quoque judicem securi videamus, Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum Filium tuum:  Qui"

1662:  Book of common prayer:  dropped (appears nowhere), to reappear in Great Britain only in 1892.

1789 (first American):  Book of common prayer:  for the first of two (if two) Christmas-Day communions only:    "O God, who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the birth of thine only Son Jesus Christ; Grant that as we joyfully receive him for our Redeemer, so we may with sure confidence behold him when he shall come to be our Judge, who"

1892 (British):  recovered for the first of two (if two) Christmas-Day communions only (Hatchett, 168).

1928 (American):  Book of common prayer:  for the first of two (if two) Christmas-Day communions only, as in the 1789.

1970:  Collect, Vigil of the Nativity, current Missale Romanum:  "Deus, qui nos redemptionis nostrae annua exspectatione laetificas, praesta, ut Unigenitum tuum, quem laeti suscipimus Redemptorem, venientem quoque Iudicem securi videre mereamur, Dominum nostrum, Iesum Christum.  Qui":  "O God, who gladden us year by year as we wait in hope for our redemption, grant that, just as we joyfully welcome your Only Begotten [Son] as our Redeemer, we may also merit to face him confidently when he comes again as our Judge.  Who"

1971:  Oratio, Ad I Vesperas In Nativitate, Liturgia horarum:  "Deus, qui nos redemptionis nostrae annua exspectatione laetificas, praesta, ut Unigenitum tuum, quem laeti sucipimus redemptorum, venientem quoque iudicem securi videre mereamur.  Per"

1979:  Collect (Traditional (one of three)), The Nativity of Our Lord:  Christmas Day, Book of common prayer:  "O God, who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the birth of thy only Son Jesus Christ:  Grant that as we joyfully receive him for our Redeemer, so we may with sure confidence behold him when he shall come to be our Judge; who"

Once the frightful wastelands and hiding places of beasts, [but] now the most delightful habitations of men

     "We find something of this idea [that 'Settlement in a new, unknown, uncultivated country is equivalent to an act of Creation'] recurring in the European Middle Ages, when religious orders moved into forests or wastes and turned them into cultivated land.  It was claimed on behalf of these monasteries in Carolingian times that they brought it about that 'Horridae quondam solitudines ferarum nunc amoenissima diversiora hominum'."

     Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 336, citing Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian shore (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1967), 117, citing (apparently) sec. V of the Præfatio to Acta sanctorum ordinis S. Benedicti ... : saeculum tertium / collegit domnus Lucas d'Archery congregationis Sancti Mauri monarchus ; ac cum eo edidit D. Joannes Mabillon eiusdem congregationis ... ; pars prima (Venetiis : apud Sebastianum Coleti & Josephum Bettinelli, 1734), xxi:

horridæ quondam solitudines & latibula ferarum : nunc hominum amœnissima diversoria, . . .

For diversiora, read deversoria < deversorius, -a, -um.

"Often, when it comes to protecting children, no good deed goes unpunished".

      Andrew O'Hagan, "A deep dark place," a review of Mayhem (New York:  Knopf, 2017), by Sigrid Rausing, The New York review of books 65, no. 7 (April 19, 2018):  32 (32-33).  "Sigrid did the right thing, but she is left with the wrong feeling—and that, too, is a legacy of abuse.  It sets a trap for the protector.  The author has serenity, courage, and wisdom, the mainstays of the twelve-step program, and she has a gift for wielding each of them into paragraphs that will stay in the mind.  Yet the mayhem of Hans and Eva [Rausing] has bred a mayhem in her that will take time to dissolve into something more like plain regret" (33).

"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. . . .