LARRY KING & VIRGIN BIRTH

"'If you could select any one person across all of history to interview, who would it be?' someone asked Larry King, turning the tables on the television interviewer. 'Jesus Christ,' he responded. And what would King, a skeptical Jew, ask him? 'I would like to ask him if he was indeed virgin-born. The answer to that question would define history for me.'"

PHILIP YANCEY, RUMORS OF ANOTHER WORLD

A CRUEL REMORSELESS EMPEROR

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?"

CAPTAIN AHAB in HERMAN MELVILLE'S MOBY DICK

IS THERE A GOD?

Is there a God? Well, is there? I myself should be very happy to answer with an emphatic negative. Temperamentally, it would suit me well enough to settle for what this world offers, and to write off as wishful thinking, or just the self-importance of the human species, any notion of a divine purpose and a divinity to entertain and execute it. The earth's sounds and smells and colours are very sweet; human love brings golden hours; the mind at work earns delight. I have never wanted a God, or feared a God, or felt under any necessity to invent one. Unfortunately, I am driven to the conclusion that God wants me.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE, NEW STATESMAN, 1966

THE ONLY THREAD OF CONSISTENCY

The first thing I remember about the world -- and I pray it may be the last -- is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling which everyone has in some degree and which is at once the glory and the desolation of homo sapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE, NEW STATESMAN