laudable Practice

From Richard Warner's   The Sermon on the mount; in five discourses  (1840) - five sermons preached "on several successive Sunday afternoons" - an example of how Warner applies the Beatitudes to the ordinary duties and relationships of his parishioners: "Blessed are the meek" - those who control and extinguish the fierce passions, and unchristian dispositions of a fallen nature; who regulate their tempers; and bridle their tongues, from uttering irritating; abusive; censorious; unkind; false; or profane language - "for they shall inherit the earth" - for such mild and peaceable Christians, "shall see good days", even in this world of sin and sorrow: they shall find protectors and friends: enjoy tranquillity and peace: and either escape from those evils, in which the violent, and passionate, quarrelsome, malicious, and envious, are constantly involving themselves and others; or, shall at least, be supported under such evils; by the solid comfo...

The response in the The Spectator by Graham Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington, to suggestions that the late Prince Philip embodied a form of 'epitomised a very British stoicism' represents a contemporary version of Tertullian's 'what has Athens to with Jerusalem?'.  The answer to this question by historic, orthodox Christianity - beginning with St. Paul quoting "your own poets" as he spoke to the Stoics and Epicureans in the Areopagus - has tended to be 'quite a bit, actually'. Now Tomlin does seem to recognise this when he says of Stoic teaching "there is real wisdom in all this" and admits that "many early Christian thinkers in the days when Stoic thought was at its most popular recognised it". This, however, is entirely overshadowed by the article's 'what have the Stoics to do with Christianity?' stance, beginning with the rather silly suggestion that "The Monty Python sketch depicting Christ on the cross, calml...