“Every man knows that he understands religion and politics, though he never learned them; but many people are conscious they do not understand many other sciences, from having never learned them.”
Jonathan Swift, paraphrased in the Letter of the Earl of Chesterfield to his Son (March 25, 1751)
“Carefully avoid an argumentative and disputative turn, which too many people have, and some even value themselves upon . . . and when you find your antagonist beginning to grow warm, put an end to the dispute by some genteel badinage.”
Letter of the Earl of Chesterfield to his Son (Nov. 5, 1765)
Theological and political debates at the Orthosphere are only sometimes argumentative, disputative and warm. The prevailing tranquility in these parts is partly owing to our civility, partly owing to our personal modesty, and partly owing to our prudent use of cooling doses of “genteel badinage.” This tranquility is creditable because, as Swift somewhere said, every man is jealous of his own religious and political opinions. A man who is grateful to be corrected on a practical point in natural science will, as it were, fight like a tiger to defend his religious and political cubs.
Here are a couple of instructive examples from my neighborhood in Texas, a century and more ago. The first appeared in the Navasota Examiner, April 18, 1895, and relates a theological debate that grew overly warm at a church in Iola, twenty miles east of here. The incendiary question was whether grace must be evidenced by works or may be fully present in an unreformed sinner.
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