Fading Summer Mornings

Summer ends with a feeling of defeat. Defeat in ever thinking that pleasant June mornings could last, defeat in thinking that the resolves, goals, and hopes of late spring would be realized, defeat from the oppressive heat from August. School starts next week. The long summer mornings of readings have come to an end. (It gets worse: all we had here was instant coffee this morning. Other than staving off a caffeine headache, it has no use.)

All is not lost. The last few mornings have been blessed by some good readings.

Still, with the fading of summer, there are some enjoyable end-of-summer morning readings.

I recently went out to the study to retrieve the volume of Francis Schaeffer's Complete Works that contained his wonderful short work "The Mark of a Christian." By mistake, I brought in volume 3, "A Christian View of Spirituality," and started reading "Two Contents, Two Realities." This may have been printed back in the 1970s as a booklet. It was an address Schaeffer gave in 1974. Like any work that is older, it is dated at points, but like so much of Schaeffer's writing, it still contains lots of gold. He emphasizes two contents, which are Sound Doctrine and Honest Answers to Honest Questions, and then two realities, which are True Spirituality and the Beauty of Human Relationships. I am now re-reading this short, but powerful sermon.

I am also reading a bit from one of those marvelous Banner of Truth publications. This one is titled The Revival of Religion: Addresses by Scottish Evangelical Leaders delivered in Glasgow in 1840. By any account, and by many accounts written by Iain Murray, the Scots have really impacted the world through their evangelical zeal. Their preaching, prayers, and zeal for revival is a message needing to be heard more than ever. Scottish evangelicalism with Dutch worldview thinking makes a great combination for spiritual advancement.

Allow a quote from the book:

When the church is made to hear the voice of the Lord, "Strengthen the things that remain, which are ready to die"--"Behold I come quickly; be zealous therefore and repent"--when she is led to mourn over her past deadness, and turn again to the Lord her God--when a new power and life is felt in secret, in family, and in public prayer--when enlarged views of Divine truth are opened up, and an enlarged experience of its reality is possessed by them, then is there a revival of religion."

[The church pictured above is in Scotland, but I don't know whether it was a Protestant church or not. I assume it was.]



I have finally gotten past the first few pages of Charles Hill's great book Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order. The first chapter, "Classical Orders," covers portions of Homer's Iliad, Aeschylus' Oresteia, Xenophon's The March Up Country, Thucydides' Peloponnessian War, and Virgil's treatment of Aeneas and the Trojan Horse. This book is an invitation to the classics or a returning to the classics. It is an education in the great books in short form. It made me anxious to re-read The Aeneid for the 5th (?) time and to read Xenophon for the first time.

Perhaps the nicer weather these past few mornings with the routines of the classroom will compensate for the loss of summer reading time.