CH.—You do not really mean to say, Miss Flora, that there can be any wisdom in serving God by systematically renouncing all the good things which he has prepared for us? Is it not rather monstrous ingratitude and most faulty manners, when a kind host spreads the board with all sorts of dainties for your entertainment, to refuse to taste one of them, and wrap yourself up in the cold garb of general abstinence? It brings me to despair of humanity when I think that the highest Christian authorities for centuries should have set the seal of their approval on such a hateful caricature of the piety of their Master.
"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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Thursday, May 08, 2014
Ingratitude
John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), Altavona: Fact and Fiction from My Life in the Highlands (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1882), p. 240: