That familiar smell

I found the quotation from C.S. Lewis that I was thinking of last night. It's in one of my favorite essays and it doesn't use the phrase family resemblence at all! But that is what its talking about really.

They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading [old books]. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But ... Measured against the ages "mere Christianity" turns out to be ... something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible.

I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there(honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe—Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed "Paganism" of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet - after all - so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life: an air that kills "From yon far country blows."

C.Lewis "On the Reading of Old Books"

Men of differing political views - but brothers in Christ!