"What the Church is like"

"AND I feel above all, this simple and forgotten fact; that whether certain charges are or are not true of Catholics, they are quite unquestionably true of everybody else. It never occurs to the critic to do anything so simple as to compare what is Catholic with what is Non-Catholic. The one thing that never seems to cross his mind, when he argues about what the Church is like, is the simple question of what the world would be like without it.

"That is what I mean by being too narrow to see the house called the church against the background called the cosmos."

 ~G.K. Chesterton: The Thing.

Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter, by Giovanni Battista Castello.

Illumination on vellum, 1598; Musée du Louvre, Paris

"Most absurd thing that could be said of the Church"

"I TAKE in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them."

~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chap. IX.

"The Church"

“THE most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back to the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.” (Orthodoxy)

"CHRISTENDOM has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave." (The Everlasting Man)

~G.K. Chesterton

"The Church would still somehow exist in God"

MacIan burst out like a man driven back and explaining everything.

"The Church is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club," he cried. "If the Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athenaeum Club would dissolve and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence? And yet you ask me to trust my temperament, my own temperament, which can be turned upside down by two bottles of claret or an attack of the jaundice. You ask me to trust that when it softens towards you and not to trust the thing which I believe to be outside myself and more real than the blood in my body."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Ball and the Cross.

"The Dark Ages"

"IN a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them."

 ~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.

"The key of a permanent virtue"

"CHRISTIANITY is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. ...The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.”

~G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross.

"A suit of funeral black"

“A RELIGION that merely dresses for church as it dresses for dinner, a religion that merely prays into a top-hat and calls a suit of funeral black its Sunday best—that does not express what is expressed either by a hermit or a hierarchy; does not express anything, except that its followers would have been equally contented with anything else. Whatever it is, the church of Christ must not merely be what some of my Anglican friends used humorously to call Mod. High. It must be very high, like the spire of Cologne cathedral or the tower of Salisbury; or it must be very low, like the catacombs or the cave of Bethlehem.”

~G.K. Chesterton: The Resurrection of Rome.

The Church

'THE CHURCH is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club,' he cried.' If the Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athenaeum Club would dissolve and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside all of us which is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist in God.'

~G.K. Chesterton: The Ball and the Cross.

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