 he had willingly committed the act. His parents, thereupon, finally understood their son's intention and aim, which they did not deem human but divine. As a result, they left him to tread his own path as God enlightened him. And despite his exacting life, Luke did not neglect showing his parents proper respect and love and obedience in his daily chores.
Saint Luke continued and increased his strict mode of abstinence and fasting throughout his life.
Kontakion in the Plagal of the Fourth Tone
God, Who by judgments known to Him chose thee from when thou wast formed,
that thou, O Luke, mightest be right well-pleasing unto Him; from the womb made thee His own and He sanctified thee; as His own true faithful servant hath He shown thee forth and hath set aright thy footsteps, ever guiding thee as the Friend of man; thou rejoicest before Him now.
From The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church - February 7.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Saint Luke, as a child, cannot be compared to other youngsters. While other boys love to play, laugh, and run hither and thither, Luke was quiet and well-behaved, and showed himself in every activity as one with the gravity of an old man. The child also manifested sober habits and a strong love for continence and self-control.
Lecture (in Greek) by Metropolitan George of Thebes at the Church of St. Nicholas in Patras. He is the current abbot of the Holy Monastery of Hosios Loukas.
The recent re-emergence of our religion is a survival of the fittest as Darwin meant it, and not as popular Darwinism meant it; so far as it meant anything. Among the innumerable muddles, which mere materialistic fashion made out of the famous theory, there was in many quarters a queer idea that the Struggle for Existence was of necessity an actual struggle between the candidates for survival; literally a cut-throat competition. There was a vague idea that the strongest creature violently crushed the others. And the notion that this was the one method of improvement came everywhere as good news to bad men; to bad rulers, to bad employers, to swindlers and sweaters and the rest. The brisk owner of a bucket-shop compared himself modestly to a mammoth, trampling down other mammoths in the primeval jungle. The business man destroyed other business men, under the extraordinary delusion that the eohippic horse had devoured other eohippic horses. The rich man suddenly discovered that it was not only convenient but cosmic to starve or pillage the poor, because pterodactyls may have used their little hands to tear each other’s eyes. Science, that nameless being, declared that the weakest must go to the wall; especially in Wall Street. There was a rapid decline and degradation in the sense of responsibility in the rich, from the merely rationalistic eighteenth century to the purely scientific nineteenth. The great Jefferson, when he reluctantly legalised slavery, said he trembled for his country, knowing that God is just. The profiteer of later times, when he legalised usury or financial trickery, was satisfied with himself; knowing that Nature is unjust.
But, however that may be (and of course the moral malady has survived scientific mistake) the people who talked thus of cannibal horses and competitive oysters, did not understand what Darwin’s thesis was. If later biologists have condemned it, it should not be condemned without being understood, widely as it has been accepted without being understood. The point of Darwinism was not that a bird with a longer beak (let us say) thrust it into other birds, and had the advantage of a duelist with a longer sword. The point of Darwinism was that the bird with the longer beak could reach worms (let us say) at the bottom of a deeper hole; that the birds who could not do so would die; and he alone would remain to found a race of long-beaked birds. Darwinism suggested that if this happened a vast number of times, in a vast series of ages, it might account for the difference between the beaks of a sparrow and a stork. But the point was that the fittest did not need to struggle against the 