Mildewed and Numbing

Thielicke:

There is a kind of piety, a kind of obedience that has about it a mildewed, numbing lack of freshness and vitality that never makes a person really happy. There are plenty of ‘good people’ whose religion never makes them really warm and happy.

--Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father: Sermons on the Parables of Jesus (Harper, 1959), 33