Margaret’s Song

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  There was a king in Thule,  True even to the grave;  To whom his dying mistress  A golden beaker gave.  At every feast he drained it,  Naught was to him so dear,  And often as he drained it,  Gush’d from his eyes the tear.  When death came, unrepining  His cities o’er he told;  All to his heir resigning,  Except his cup of gold.  With many a knightly vassal  At a royal feast sat he,  In yon proud hall ancestral,  In his castle o’er the sea.  Up stood the jovial monarch,  And quaff’d his last life’s glow,  Then hurled the hallow’d goblet  Into the flood below.  He saw it splashing, drinking,  And plunging in the sea;  His eyes meanwhile were sinking,  And never again drank he. “Margaret’s Song” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in “Faust. Part I.”

What your Preacher produces

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“Easy-going preachers produce easy-going believers. We have more star preachers than scarred preachers, more expositors than exposers, more who are concerned to ‘get it over’ than to ‘pray it through.’ We have more religious educators than soul emancipators. The pulpiteer of our times is expected to enlighten the mind rather than to enliven the conscience. To many, the width of his head matters more than the depth of his heart. So, even with a steel ring of communism around the world, and the sewers of moral filth pouring over it, we find the Church more interested in pie than piety, and the Lord's weakened army 'by schism rent asunder' and by conflicting interpretations oppressed.”

Leonard Ravenhill, quoted in the April/May 2008 Old Paths Newsletter

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