"Orthodox theology"

"IT was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the Freethinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalists made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures, the dreadful thought broke into my mind, 'Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.'  I was in a desperate way."

~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.

Compulsory insurance

"But it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform that Germany was believed to be leading the way, and to have found the secret of dealing with the economic evil. In the case of Insurance, which was the test case she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set apart a portion of their wages for any time of sickness; and numerous other provisions, both in Germany and England, pursued the same ideal, which was that of protecting the poor against themselves. It everywhere involved an external power having a finger in the family pie; but little attention was paid to any friction thus caused, for all prejudices against the process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance." (A Short History of England)

"I am not a Conservative, whatever I am; I am certainly not a Unionist, whatever I am; but the general atmosphere of liberality was too illiberal to be endured... Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act roughly marks the moment of my disappearance; for I thought it a step to the Servile State; as legally recognising two classes of citizens; fixed as masters and servants." (Autobiography)

~G.K. Chesterton

Poem: The House of Christmas

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

~G.K. Chesterton

The Adoration of the Shepherds, by Giorgione.
Oil on panel, 1505-10; National Gallery of Art, Washington.

"The best of all impossible worlds"

"THE world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds. . . Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived such a thing; that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds."

~G.K. Chesterton: Charles Dickens.

Poem: The Ancient of Days

A child sits in a sunny place,
Too happy for a smile,
And plays through one long holiday
With balls to roll and pile;
A painted wind-mill by his side,
Runs like a merry tune,
But the sails are the four great winds of heaven,
And the balls are the sun and moon.

A staring doll's-house shows to him
Green floors and starry rafter,
And many-coloured graven dolls
Live for his lonely laughter.
The dolls have crowns and aureoles,
Helmets and horns and wings,
For they are the saints and seraphim,
The prophets and the kings.

~G.K. Chesterton

"The root of all religion"

“IT IS the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.”

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

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Christian Festivities and the Termite State

“THE modern world has, in the literal sense of the word, made everybody much too insignificant. It has, in the old Greek sense of the word, made every man far too much of an idiot. For insignificance only means lack of significance; and idiot in the old Greek sense only meant a man without any public or philosophic or religious significance. I might, to my deep and desolating grief, cause offence if I said that the commercial and industrial world is now conducted by a vast army of idiots. But Plato would have understood what I mean; and many more are understanding it, especially those who substitute the more respectful description of an army of ants. What is called the Termite State has followed on what was understood, or rather not understood, by the Servile State. It is only too likely, on the face of it, that the ant-hill will rise higher than mere mountains like Sinai or Olympus or Calvary; that mankind will be directed to a monstrous uniformity in which the individual ideals of the past will be lost; and the quarrels of the sects will yield to the complete comradeship of the insects. But any man who keeps Christmas in his own home is resisting the tragic transformation of the home into the hive.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, Dec. 21, 1935. 

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