"They have not discovered where to rest"

"FEMINISM, for instance, is in its nature a movement, and one that must stop somewhere. But the Suffragettes no more established a philosophy of the sexes by their feminism than the Arabs did by their anti-feminism. A woman can find her home on the hustings even less than in the harem; but such movements do not really attempt to find a final home for anybody or anything. Bolshevism is a movement; and in my opinion a very natural and just movement considered as a revolt against the crude cruelty of Capitalism. But when we find the Bolshevists making a rule that the drama "must encourage the proletarian spirit," it is obvious that those who say so are not only maniacs but, what is more to the point here, are monomaniacs. Imagine having to apply that principle, let us say, to "Charley's Aunt." None of these things seek to establish a complete philosophy such as Aquinas founded on Aristotle. The only two modern men who attempted it were Comte and Herbert Spencer. Spencer, I think, was too small a man to do it at all; and Comte was a great enough man to show how difficult it is to do it in modern times. None of these movements can do anything but move; they have not discovered where to rest." --The New Jerusalem.

"THERE is the obvious contradiction that feminism often means the refusal to be feminine." --Illustrated London News, Oct. 18, 1928.

~G.K. Chesterton

"A welter of exceptions with no rules"

“UNLESS we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.” 

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, Sept. 21, 1929.

G.K. Chesterton, Theologian

Recommended reading: G.K. Chesterton, Theologian by Aidan Nichols

One of the greatest Catholic minds of the twentieth century was a journalist, playwright, novelist, literary critic, poet, cartoonist, essayist, broadcaster, and even president of the Detection Club.

But he was also a theologian.

G. K. Chesterton, famous for defending Christian belief in his books Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man (the latter helped to convert C.S. Lewis) could not help thinking theologically even when he was making jokes and his writings illuminate the profoundest religious themes.

In his hands, Christian truth is rescued from becoming a purely academic exercise. He gives us an "experience of the fullness and many-sidedness of the truth, in which the Christian can romp without a care" (Balthasar).

In fact, like Lewis, Chesterton, who was one of the great converts of the twentieth century, draws us directly into an encounter with the Word of God, showing us the faith of the Church as most of us have never seen it before. No wonder Pope Benedict XVI tells us that "in every age the path to faith can take its bearings by converts."

But Chesterton wrote so much literally millions of words in thousands of essays and books that the average reader may feel daunted. There has never been one book that introduces his thoughts on God and the Church ... until now, courtesy of the wise Dominican priest, Aidan Nichols.

In these pages, Fr. Nichols has gathered the most powerful theological passages from the many works of Chesterton, and included his own concise explanations of the keen and sometimes surprising ways they illuminate the most profound questions ever asked by man.

Readers new to Chesterton as well as his lifelong fans will delight in the fresh light he sheds here on the existence of God, the nature of man, the meaning of Christ, and the universal call to holiness, which in these pages rings out as loudly as it did when G.K. Chesterton first wrote these words over a century ago.

--Sophia Institute Press review

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Democracy and evolution

"DEMOCRACY swept Europe with the sabre when it was founded upon the Rights of Man. It has done literally nothing at all since it has been founded only upon the wrongs of man. Or, more strictly speaking, its recent failure has been due to its not admitting the existence of any rights, or wrongs, or indeed of any humanity. Evolution (the sinister enemy of revolution) does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man. And all the despair about the poor, and the cold and repugnant pity for them, has been largely due to the vague sense that they have literally relapsed into the state of the lower animals."

 ~G.K. Chesterton: Charles Dickens, IX.

"Aristocracy is not a government"

"ALL government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government which is not only coercive; but collective. There are only two kinds of government, as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic. Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effective kind of riot, a riot of the rich."

~G.K. Chesterton: What's Wrong With the World.

"Happiness consists in being a creature"

"MAN is a creature; all his happiness consists in being a creature; or, as the Great Voice commanded us, in becoming a child. All his fun is in having a gift or present; which the child, with profound understanding, values because it is 'a surprise'. But surprise implies that a thing comes from outside ourselves; and gratitude that it comes from someone other than ourselves. It is thrust through the letter-box; it is thrown in at the window; it is thrown over the wall. Those limits are the lines of the very plan of human pleasure."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale.

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"How shallow all these moderns are"

“DON’T you understand how shallow all these moderns are, when they tell you there is no such thing as Atonement or Expiation, when that is the one thing for which the whole heart is sick before the sins of the world? The whole universe was wrong, while the lie of my father flourished like the green bay-tree. It was not respectability that could redeem it. It was religion, expiation, sacrifice, suffering. Somebody must be terribly good, to balance what was so bad. Somebody must be needlessly good, to weigh down the scales of that judgment.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Four Faultless Felons.

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