"We are Christians and Catholics"

“WE ARE Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.”

~G.K. Chesterton:  The Everlasting Man.

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• Ignatius Press

"We have a censorship by the Press"

"AT present, it is not we that silence the Press; it is the Press that silences us. It is not a case of the Commonwealth settling how much the editors shall say; it is a case of the editors settling how much the Commonwealth shall know." (ILN, Oct. 19, 1907)

"BUT the modern editor regards himself far too much as a kind of original artist, who can select and suppress facts with the arbitrary ease of a poet or a caricaturist." (ILN, Oct. 26, 1907)

"THE frivolous chatter is now all in public journalism. (ILN, Feb. 1908)

"THE new method of journalism is to offer so many comments or, at least, secondary circumstances that there is actually no room left for the original facts." (ILN, Nov. 6, 1909)

"IT is by this time practically quite impossible to get the truth out of newspapers, even the honest newspapers." (ILN, Jan. 23, 1909)

"AND the papers are shouting louder and louder like demagogues, merely because their hearers are growing more and more deaf." (ILN, Dec. 8, 1928)

"WHAT I protest against is the prevailing fashion, in the Press and elsewhere, of parading all this perfectly natural indifference and ignorance as if it were a sort of  impartiality." (ILN, Apr. 12, 1930)

"THERE is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the constitution: it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution and work behind its back. He will take no advantage of his kingly power: it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly powerlessness -- of the fact that he is free from criticism and publicity. For the King is the most private person of our time. It will not be necessary for anyone to fight against the proposal of a censorship of the Press. We do not need a censorship of the Press. We have a censorship by the Press." (Orthodoxy)

~G.K. Chesterton

"There was something that He hid from all men"

"JOY, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Orthodoxy.

"Modern war is much greater"

"I DO NOT KNOW whether Martin Luther invented mustard gas, or George Fox manufactured tear-shells, or St. Thomas Aquinas devised a stink-bomb producing suffocation. If wars are the horrid fruits of a thing called Christianity, they are also the horrid fruits of everything called citizenship and democracy and liberty and national independence, and are we to judge all these and condemn them by... their fruits? Anyhow such a modern war is much greater than any of the wars that can be referred to religious motives, or even religious epochs. The broad truth about the matter is that wars have become more organised, and more ghastly in the particular period of Materialism."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, July 26, 1930.

"The suburbs"

“I STILL hold. . .that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.”

~G.K. Chesterton:  The Coloured Lands.

Poem: Bob-Up-And-Down

IRRESPONSIBLE outbreak of one who, having completed a book of enormous length on the Poet Chaucer, feels himself freed from all bonds of intellectual self-respect and proposes to do no work for an indefinite period.

“Wot ye not wher ther start a litel town,
Which that icleped is Bob-up-an-down.” --THE CANTERBURY TALES.

They babble on of Babylon,
They tire me out with Tyre,
And Sidon putting me side on,
I do not much admire.
But the little town Bob-up-and-Down,
That lies beyond the Blee,
Along the road our fathers rode,
O that’s the road for me.

In dome and spire and cupola
It bubbles up and swells
For the company that canter
To the Canterbury Bells.
But when the Land Surveyors come
With maps and books to write,
The little town Bob-up-and-Down
It bobs down out of sight.

I cannot live in Liverpool,
O lead me not to Leeds,
I’m not a Man in Manchester,
Though men be cheap as weeds:
But the little town Bob-up-and-Down,
That bobs towards the sea,
And knew its name when Chaucer came,
O that’s the town for me.

I’ll go and eat my Christmas meat
In that resurgent town,
And pledge to fame our Father’s name
Till the sky bobs up and down;
That’s played beside the Blee,
Bob-Apple in Bob-up-and-Down,
O that’s the game for me.

Now Huddersfield is Shuddersfield,
And Hull is nearly Hell,
Where a Daisy would go crazy
Or a Canterbury Bell,
Alone is fair and free,
For it can’t be found above the ground,
O that’s the place for me.

~G.K. Chesterton: The Coloured Lands.

The Coloured Lands: Fairy Stories, Comic Verse and Fantastic Pictures
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Religion and the New Science

"I HAVE NEVER been able to understand why men of science, or men of any sort, should have such a special affection for Disorganised Religion. They would hardly utter cries of hope and joy over the prospect of Disorganised Biology or Disorganised Botany. They would hardly wish to see the whole universe of astronomy disorganised, with no relations, no records, no responsibilities for the fulfillment of this or that function, no reliance on the regularity of this or that law."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, April 12, 1930.