A little help and comfort while I live.
(2649)
See [Lost Chords].
Regular Inspection—See [Cleanliness].
REGULARITY, ECCLESIASTICAL
Butler, the famous author of Butler’s “Analogy,” himself, with all his high gifts, supplies, in his own person, an expressive proof of the spiritual blindness and death which lay on the churches of Wesley’s day. He forbade Whitefield and the Wesleys to preach in his diocese, tho all around his cathedral city lay the most degraded and hopeless class in England—the coal-miners of Kingswood, as untouched by any of the forces of Christianity as if they had been savages in Central Africa. That the best, the wisest, the most powerful, the most earnestly convinced of the bishops of that day should take this attitude toward Wesley and his work shows what was the general temper of the clergy of that time. Butler’s conscience was not disquieted by the lapse into mere heathenism of a whole class within sound of the bells of his cathedral; but he grows piously indignant at the spectacle of an ecclesiastical irregularity.—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”
(2650)
Regulation, Timepiece—See [Synchronism].
REJECTION OF CHRIST
George Frederick Watts, the great symbolical artist of “Love and Death,” “Hope,” “Time, Death, and Judgment,” and other famous pictures, painted “The Ruler.” Speaking of the picture afterward he said, “Now I am doing a man’s back—little else but his back, to explain ‘he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.’ Fancy a man turning his back on Christ rather than give away his goods! They say his back looks sorry; I don’t know. It is what I meant his back to express.” (Text.)