Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith, just as indifference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love.
Peter Kreeft 1938-


~


How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as
take warning?
Jonathan Swift 1667-1745
The Battle of the Books and Other Short Pieces, ca. 1697



~


Whatever women must do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.
Luckily, this is not difficult.
Charlotte Whitton 1896-1975
Canadian Feminist and Mayor of Ottawa




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The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain, 1869
[An account of his trip to Europe and the Holy Land in the 19th century]
from chp. 7

We were approaching the famed Pillars of Hercules, and already the
African one, "Ape's Hill," a grand old mountain with summit streaked with
granite ledges, was in sight. The other, the great Rock of Gibraltar,
was yet to come. The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the
head of navigation and the end of the world. The information the
ancients didn't have was very voluminous. Even the prophets wrote book
after book and epistle after epistle, yet never once hinted at the
existence of a great continent on our side of the water; yet they must
have known it was there, I should think.

In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly
in the center of the wide strait and apparently washed on all sides by
the sea, swung magnificently into view, and we needed no tedious traveled
parrot to tell us it was Gibraltar. There could not be two rocks like
that in one kingdom.

~

"Are you going through Spain to Paris?" That question was bandied about
the ship day and night from Fayal to Gibraltar, and I thought I never
could get so tired of hearing any one combination of words again or more
tired of answering, "I don't know." At the last moment six or seven had
sufficient decision of character to make up their minds to go, and did
go, and I felt a sense of relief at once--it was forever too late now and
I could make up my mind at my leisure not to go. I must have a
prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to
make it up.

But behold how annoyances repeat themselves. We had no sooner gotten rid
of the Spain distress than the Gibraltar guides started another--a
tiresome repetition of a legend that had nothing very astonishing about
it, even in the first place: "That high hill yonder is called the Queen's
Chair; it is because one of the queens of Spain placed her chair there
when the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, and said she
would never move from the spot till the English flag was lowered from the
fortresses. If the English hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag
for a few hours one day, she'd have had to break her oath or die up
there."

~

While I was resting ever so comfortably on a rampart, and cooling my
baking head in the delicious breeze, an officious guide belonging to
another party came up and said:

"Senor, that high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair--"

"Sir, I am a helpless orphan in a foreign land. Have pity on me. Don't
--now don't inflict that most in-FERNAL old legend on me anymore today!"

There--I had used strong language after promising I would never do so
again; but the provocation was more than human nature could bear. If you
had been bored so, when you had the noble panorama of Spain and Africa
and the blue Mediterranean spread abroad at your feet, and wanted to gaze
and enjoy and surfeit yourself in its beauty in silence, you might have
even burst into stronger language than I did.