Catholic priest (1871-1914)
A lion is at liberty who can follow the laws of his own nature, who can eat when his stomach tells him, who can sleep when his fierce eyes grow weary, who can scratch long furrows in a forest tree when his claws feel so disposed. He is not at liberty when he lives in a cage, is fed on horseflesh at 4 p.m., and is compelled at the point of a red-hot poker to spell P-I-G – PIG, in the presence of a diverted crowd.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Intellectual Slavery
Please do not think for a second, as some people do, that Love is primarily an affair of the emotions. It is not: it never ought to be. It is an affair of the will: it is an act of choice.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Spiritual Letters of Monsignor R. Hugh Benson to One of His Converts
Society is not merely a select body of spiritual or intellectual persons, but a great organism composed of all kinds of members, a net containing bad and good.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
A City Set on a Hill
The Church must be intelligible to the simple as well as to the shrewd.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
A City Set on a Hill
Sin is the rebellion of man's will against God's.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Lord of the World
While friendship itself has an air of eternity about it, seeming to transcend all natural limits, there is hardly any emotion so utterly at the mercy of time. We form friendships, and grow out of them. It might almost be said that we cannot retain the faculty of friendship unless we are continually making new friends.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
The Friendship of Christ
Youth is a disease that must be borne with patiently! Time, indeed, will cure it.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Come Rack! Come Rope!
It is difficult for any soul to sin very outrageously so long as she feels the pressure of Christ's hand in hers.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
The Friendship of Christ
No man can be a friend of Jesus Christ who is not a friend of his neighbor.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
The Friendship of Christ
There is all the difference in the world between knowing that a catastrophe is going to happen, and knowing that it has happened.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
None Other Gods
First, it was borne in upon me what a mutilated Christianity that is which practically takes no account of Mary. This fragmentary, lopsided faith was that in which I myself had been brought up, and which to-day still is the faith of the majority of my fellow-countrymen. The Mother of God--the Second Eve, the Immaculate Maiden Mother, who, as if to balance Eve at the Tree of Death, stood by the Tree of Life--in popular non-Catholic theology is banished, with the rest of those who have passed away, to a position of complete insignificance. This arrangement, I had become accustomed to believe, was that of Primitive Christianity and of the Christianity of all sensible men: Romanism had added to the simple Gospel, and had treated the Mother of God with an honour which she would have been the first to deprecate.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Lourdes
Once, in the early ages, Satan's attack had been made on the bodily side, with whips and fire and beasts; in the sixteenth century it had been on the intellectual side; in the twentieth century on the springs of moral and spiritual life. Now it seemed as if the assault was on all three planes at once.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Lord of the World
When a man falls in love suddenly his whole centre changes. Up to that point he has probably referred everything to himself--considered things from his own point. When he falls in love the whole thing is shifted; he becomes a part of the circumference--perhaps even the whole circumference; someone else becomes the centre.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
A Mirror of Shalott
A really high degree of proficiency in any particular subject invariably leads to atrophy in other directions. A man who eats and breathes and dreams Toxins, for instance, who lives so much in Toxins that he corresponds almost daily with learned and unintelligible Germans; who knows so much about Toxins that when he enters, with shabby trousers and a small hand-bag, into the room of a polished specialist in Harley Street, he sees as in a dream the specialist rise and bow before him--who, when he can be persuaded to contribute a short and highly technical article to a medical magazine, receives a check for twenty-five guineas by return of post--a man of this kind is peculiarly open to the danger of thinking that anything which cannot be expressed in terms of Toxin is negligible nonsense. It is the characteristic danger of every specialist in every branch of knowledge; even theologians are not wholly immune.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
None Other Gods
As for the gates of hell, is there any other institution in Christendom which compares with this for immovability, authority and impressiveness?
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
The Religion of the Plain Man
You can love a person deeply and sincerely whom you do not like. You can like a person passionately whom you do not love.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Spiritual Letters of Monsignor R. Hugh Benson to One of His Converts
Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Intellectual Slavery
Competition, founded upon the conflicting interests of individuals, is in reality far less productive of wealth and enterprise than co-operation, involving though it does the constant apparent sacrifice of the individual to the common interests.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
A City Set on a Hill
How difficult it was to hold the eyes focused on that far horizon when this world lay in the foreground so compelling in its splendour and its strength!
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Lord of the World
Be simple and quiet. Whenever your soul begins to be disturbed and anxious, put yourself in His Hands, and refuse to decide for yourself. It is easy, so easy.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
By What Authority?