“Indeed, I think it [the turn to autocracy or worse because of the failings of democracy especially under “the Party System”] is part of the one big blunder that is at the back of all our blunders. It is hard to put it shortly, except by calling it the blunder of being Practical. Perhaps the nearest word is Opportunism; but it is not the sane opportunism that takes all opportunities to advance a great thing; it is the nervy and panicky opportunism that accepts all the small things because they have more opportunities. It is this yielding to the apparently practical that has ruined everything.”

G.K. Chesterton “The True Fascist Fallacy” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

“God is not a path to fulfillment, He is fulfillment. C.S. Lewis, a devotee of Gilbert’s, was to say that if God was seen as a road, he was not seen at all.”

Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton [summing up the orthodox view in context of the young GKC’s struggles]

“I go slap through a roomful of MSS., criticizing deuced conscientiously, with the result that I post back some years of MSS. to addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums.”

G.K. Chesterton writing to E.C. Bentley (the Clerihew guy) in 1895 describing his workday and the various tasks he undertakes for a publishing house, Redway, including clearing a backlog of manuscripts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

“Running along both sides of the building’s arcade, a series of verses disparaged the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God.’ This was not merely to reopen theological debates that Christians had thought settled centuries before, but to condemn the entire New Testament, Gospels and all, as a fabrication. Squabbles among those who had written it, so the Dome of the Rock sternly declared, had polluted the original teachings of Jesus. These, like the revelations granted prophets before him, Abraham, and Moses, and David, had originally been identical to those for claimed by Muhammad. There was only the one true deen, the one true expression of allegiance to God, and that was submission to him: in Arabic, islam. Here was a doctrine with which ‘Muslims’ – those who practice islam – were already well familiar. It was not only to be found emblazoned on buildings. Most of the verses on the Dome of the Rock derived from a series of revelations that Muhammad’s followers believed had been given him by none other than the angel Gabriel. These, assembled after his death to form a single ‘recitation’ or qur’an, constituted for his followers what Jesus represented to Christians: an intrusion into the mortal world, into the sublunar, into the diurnal, of the divine.... This gave its pronouncement on Christians, as on everything else, an awful and irrevocable force.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“In a recent British study of ‘happy’ professions, hairdressing topped the list, reports The Independent on Sunday. Next happiest were the clergy, chefs, beauticians, plumbers and mechanics.”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail October 6, 2005 [and it strikes me that of these professions all but the clergy work with their hands on physical objects]

“inevitably, to attempt the tracing of Christianity’s impact on the world is to cover the rise and fall of empires, the actions of bishops and kings, the arguments of theologians, the course of revolutions, the planting of crosses around the world. It is, in particular, to focus on the doings of men. Yet that hardly tells the whole story. I have written much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [in context of his own saintly though herself childless godmother, a teacher]

“I was drawn to Chesterton for many reasons. First of all, he delighted me. Even before I understood him. I knew this man was on my side. Or rather, I knew I was on his side. Or rather, I knew I wanted to be on his side. I was enchanted by his ability to state the truth so succinctly and potently and pleasingly plain. But I never thought in those early days that the pleasure of reading Chesterton would prove to be so important. To read Chesterton is to want to repeat him.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 [and as any even semi-regular reader of these Words Worth Noting is well aware, I know the feeling]

In my latest National Post column I argue that our government’s, and our chattering classes’, material and moral feebleness on the Middle East conflict stems as usual from mental feebleness, in this case a lack of clarity or concentration either on geopolitics or Israel’s place in history.