A glorious church is like a magnificent feast, there is all the variety that may be, but every one chooses out a dish or two that he likes, and lets the rest alone. How glorious soever the church is, every one chooses out of it his own religion, by which he governs himself, and lets the rest alone.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, March 18, 2014
A Magnificent Feast
John Selden (1584-1654), Table-Talk, ed. Samuel Harvey Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), p. 39 (XVI.3):