“Charity means pardoning the unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.”
— Chesterton
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“A good man’s work is effected by doing what he does, a woman’s by being what she is.”
— Chesterton
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“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.”
— Chesterton
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“I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess.”
— Chesterton
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“Faith is the master wheel; it sets all the other graces running.”
— Thomas Watson
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“Shortcuts lead to long delays.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
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“As government grows, it takes more of your paycheck and freedom. Taxation equals less liberty.
The more they tax, the more they control.”
– Sen. Rand Paul
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“Believers live not on the first act of their faith, but on the continual act of their faith; because it is not faith they live on, but Christ…We can no more live by yesterday’s faith, than we can see by yesterday’s light, or have our life supported by yesterday’s food.”
— Rabbi Duncan
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“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.”
– George Orwell.
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The New Testament lays before us a vast array of conditions for final salvation. Not only initial repentance and faith, but perseverance in both, demonstrated in love toward God and neighbor are part of that holiness without which no one shall see the Lord. (Hebrews 12:14) Such holiness is not simply definitive– that is, it not only belongs to our justification, which is rather an imputed than imparted righteousness, but to our sanctification, that inner renewal by the Spirit. Jesus made it amply clear that the sheep will be distinguished from the goats on the last day by marks of their profession… Holiness, which is defined by love of God and neighbor…is the indispensable condition of our glorification: no one will be seated at the heavenly banquet who has not begun, however imperfectly, in new obedience… Too often we use justification and salvation interchangeably so that the suggestion we are justified without any other condition other than faith leads some to conclude that it is the only condition of salvation. However, salvation is understood broadly that encompasses the whole work of God.
— Michael Horton, from the book Introducing Covenant Theology
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“Forgiveness is a definite act performed by us on the fulfillment of certain conditions. . . . Forgiveness is something actively administered on the repentance of the person who is to be forgiven. We greatly impoverish ourselves and impair the relations that we should sustain to our brethren when we fail to appreciate what is involved in forgiveness.”
— John Murray
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“I can be willing to forgive him—when he repents. I can have a forgiving disposition toward him. But it appears to me that no longer to hold against someone the wrong he did one while believing that he himself continues to stand behind the deed, requires not treating the deed or its doer with the moral seriousness required for forgiveness….
What the therapeutic literature has in mind by “forgiveness” is an a-social and a-moral process that is entirely internal to the victim. The therapist offers to help the victim overcome her negative feelings toward the deed and its doer without in any way engaging the wrongdoer. If the victim finally arrives at the point where those negative feelings are gone, she is said to have forgiven.”
— Nicholas Wolterstorff
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“For we dream neither of faith devoid of good works nor justification that stands without them”
– John Calvin
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“Foreign aid takes money from poor people in rich countries and gives it to rich people in poor countries.”
— Ron Paul
As necessary as it can be to critique libertarianism, there are some things libertarians get right, and this is one of them. Foreign aid has done more to prop up tyrants than almost anything and almost never serves American interests.
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Divisions in the church always breed atheism in the world.
— Thomas Manton
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Incidentally, the common assertion, “you just need to believe the gospel more,” essentially undermines the position of the antinomian, not least because it devolves into a sometimes oppressive and monotonous mantra that takes the place of the multifaceted exhortations one finds in the scriptures.
— Mark Jones
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Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
— Theodore Dalrymple
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“So it seems as if Darwin’s prime claim to fame lies in this, that at the precise time when fear and dislike of God was on the increase he happened to synthesize the previous evolution theories into a single presentation, clothing it in a hypothesis that seemed adequate to_ex-plain the marvelous adaption of living things, by the mere action of natural forces, without the necessity of bringing in divine intervention.”
— Wilbert Rusch
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T. H. Huxley, who became known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” embraced the theory of evolution precisely because it gave an excuse for rejecting biblical teaching
He was looking for a way out from under biblical authority, as he explains:
“Yet I found that, whatever route I took, before long I came to a tall formidable-looking fence. Confident as I might be in the existence of an ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood the thorny barrier with its comminatory notice board – “No thoroughfare – By order, Moses.”… The only alternatives were to give up my journey which I was not minded to do – or to break the fence down and go through it.”
Evolutionary theory was embraced as a way to justify ethical autonomy – which is exactly what Romans 1:18ff would lead us to expect
—
Darwin had “horrid doubt” about the coherence of his own theory:
“Darwin said it well in his personal letter to W. Graham on July 3, 1881: ‘But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has always been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind’?”
— from R J Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science
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“The Church is an entity which has outlasted many states, nations and empires, and it will outlast those that exist today. The Church is nothing other than that movement launched into the public life of the world by its sovereign Lord to continue that which he came to do until it is finished in his return in glory. It has his promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. In spite of the crimes, blunders, compromises, and errors by which its story has been stained and is stained to this day, the Church is the great reality in comparison with which nations and empires and civilizations are passing phenomena. The Church car never settle down to being a voluntary society concerned merely with private and domestic affairs. It is bound to challenge in the name of the one Lord all the powers, ideologies, myths, assumptions, and worldviews which do not acknowledge him as Lord. If that involves conflict, trouble, and rejection, then we have the example of Jesus before us and his reminder that a servant is not greater than his master.”
— Newbigin
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It is certainly the duty of a Christian man to ascend higher than merely to seek and secure the salvation of his own soul . . . If we wish to belong to Christ, let no man be anything for himself. But let us all be whatever we are for each other.
— John Calvin
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“Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”
— Booker T. Washington
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“The faithful must hold the trowel in one hand and the sword in the other, because the building of the church must still be combined with many struggles.”
— John Calvin
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Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel in his book The Last Word:
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.36 If we say that theism is a crutch, then so is atheism. If belief in God is a response to the desire to avoid death, could it not also be argued that atheism is a response to the human desire for autonomy and freedom?
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Aldous Huxley:
I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption . . . For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation . . . [Liberation from] a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.
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Julius Caesar famously said, “Men willingly believe what they wish.”
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:In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere.”
— C.S. Lewis
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Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas…for it is the assertion of a universal negative.
— Chesterton
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“The more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics.”
— G. K. Chesterton
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Martin Luther was not an antinomian:
“Do not think that you are saved if you are a drunken pig day and night. This is a great sin, and everybody should know that this is such a great iniquity, that it makes you guilty and excludes you from eternal life. Everybody should know that such a sin is contrary to his baptism and hinders his faith and his salvation. Therefore, if you wish to be a Christian, take care that you control yourself. If you do not wish to be saved, go ahead and steal, rob, profiteer as long as you can… But if you do want to be saved, then listen to this: just as adultery and idolatry close up heaven, so does gluttony… Therefore be watchful and sober. That is what is preached to us, who want to be Christians… A drunkard is not dissuaded from his drinking by reason any more than a murderer, an adulterer, whoremonger, or usurer…What should move you is that God forbids it on pain of damnation and loss of the kingdom of heaven.”
–Martin Luther (Sermon on Soberness and Moderation, 1539)
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John Calvin:
We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ [Acts 4:12]. We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is “of him” [1 Cor. 1:30]. If we seek any other gift of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity in his conception; if gentleness; it appears in his birth. For by his birth he was made like us in all respects [Heb. 2:17] that he might learn to feel our pain [cf. Heb. 5:12]. If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross [Gal. 3:13]; if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in his resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given him to judge. In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other (Institutes 2.14.19).
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“We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and, ultimately, human fulfillment are created from the bottom up, not the government down.”
— Ronald Reagan
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“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”
— Calvin Coolidge
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“The future, though, cannot be envisioned. It is no good if we all join the neo-Puritans, or the Reconstructionists, or the renewed Orthodox, or the discipleship Charismatics. God has taken hold of Christendom and He has torn it apart. He intends to put it back together again in a new Kingdom Establishment.
We cannot advance His timetable, or presume upon His designs.
What then? Our present duties remain the same as ever. The Christian is not called to play God and manipulate history, but to serve God in his calling. And this pulls us back to basics: Bible study, prayer, the sacraments, godly home life, public worship, faithful work on the job.
For the pastor, it means that whatever camp we are in, our duties remain the same. Let worship be a true covenant re-newal, with the rite of covenant renewal restored. Let us return to God’s hymnal, the Psalter, as the foundation of our hymns (not excluding the other great hymns of the Church). Let Bible study and Biblical exposition be foremost in our teaching and preaching. In this way, we lay a foundation, we build up the saints, we prepare the way for the New Establishment to come. Who knows just how wonderful it will be?”
James Jordan, Through New Eyes
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“Calvin had inspired in his disciples that energy of piety which abhors all halfway measures, which boldly endeavors to make all affairs of life subject to Christ, the Head and Lord.”
— Augustus Lang
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“It belongs to the church of God to receive blows rather than to inflect them—but, she is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.”
–Theodore Beza to the king of Navarre
We must remember what Theodore Beza said to the King of Navarre when he was threatened with persecution.Here’s the more complete quote:
“Sire, it is truly the lot of the Church of God, for which I speak, to endure blows and not to strike them. But may it please you to remember that it is an anvil which has worn out many hammers.”
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“Making it to the top is not the mark of a good man or of being in the right. But there’s nothing wrong with good men seeking to achieve and operate well at the high levels of society and life….
It’s a good thing if men of good character and competence seek and achieve positions of commensurate power, responsibility, influence, and status.“
— Aaron Renn on ambition
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Excerpts from chapter 3 three of MF Sadler’s “The Second Adam and The New Birth”:
“As original sin is that partaking of Adams nature, so regeneration is the partaking in Christ’s..
Let us remember how we are made partakers of the old nature of sin and death, of which regeneration is to be the antidote. We received the first Adam’s nature with our being, our life, our human nature, at our birth, and we receive it in a state of unconsciousness. We receive it, not through our souls, by any temptation addressed to them, but passively, through our flesh and blood, which we derive from our parents. By our generation and birth, we are made partakers of the first Adam. We may expect something corresponding to all this in the means which God has ordained to make us partakers of the Second Adam.”
Our Lord, in these words (John 3:1-5) explains Regeneration, or being “born again,” by the being “born of water end of the Spirit.” By so doing, he teaches us when this new birth takes place, and how it is to be distinguished from every other change in a man’s spiritual state.
The most careless reader cannot but perceive that our Lord’s second answer, “except a man be born of water and of the Spirit,” must be taken as explaining his first – “Except a man be born again”-
To separate what he joined- the “water” and the “Spirit” is to question his wisdom in having joined them. Whensoever, then, a man is “born again,” there and then he must be “born of water and of the Spirit.” The two must be together, or you do not have the birth indicated by the Savior.
No other time can be imagined when this takes place, except the time of our initiation into the Church of Christ by Baptism.
The Holy Spirit works on the heart of man by various means. Sometimes he uses the written Word of God, sometimes the Word preached, sometimes affliction, sometimes the near prospect of death, as His instruments for awakening a man to the realities of the eternal world; but at only one time does he work through the agency of water, and that is when he grafts a man by Baptism into Christ’s body.
Again, Regeneration and Conversion are two different terms, differently, derived, presenting two different ideas, the one *birth*, at the commencement of a life; the other, *turning* in the middle of a walk. They are never interchanged in Scripture. I do think these considerations, realized, shut us up, as it were, to the one change which the Church has always associated with these words- the Baptismal grafting into Christ. Another reason why our Lord cannot mean by the change He indicates that change of heart and life rightly called conversion, appears from the way in which he speaks to Nicodemus about “the new birth” being a *mystery* a *new* privilege, the entrance into a *new* state of things, the kingdom of God. If our Lord meant by the new birth sincere repentance, or the change of heart which a worldly man undergoes when he becomes a true Christian, He could, I think, at once have made this plain to a sincere inquirer like Nicodemus.”
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“The man who is content to sit ignorantly by his own fireside, wrapped up in his own private affairs, and has no public eye for what is going on in the Church and the world, is a miserable patriot, and a poor style of Christian. Next to our Bibles and our own hearts, our Lord would have us study our own times.”
— J.C. Ryle
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Having come to know something of the gigantic ideology of Bolshevism, I knew that I was not going to be able to settle for the pigmy ideologies of liberalism, social democracy, refurbished laissez-faire or the inverted cut-rate Bolshevism called “fascism.” Through the Machiavellians, I began to understand more thoroughly what I had long felt: that only by renouncing all ideology can we begin to see the world and man.
— James Burnham (1963)
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“There is therefore great need today, for laying fresh emphasis upon the doctrine of the Church . . . We must correct the widespread notion that Christianity is merely an affair of the individual soul. . . We must therefore teach men afresh that the blessings of the Gospel cannot be enjoyed by the single individual in his singleness, but only in his incorporation into Christ’s Mystical Body, the Holy Catholic Church.”
— John Baillie, “God’s will for the Church and Nation” (commission report to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1942)
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“There is a generation of politicians in the world that count it a point of great wisdom for a man to conceal his religion to himself. And the phrase is among men, ‘Keep your holiness and your hearts to yourselves’ . . . In these men’s conceits Christ should have wanted wisdom when he commanded peremptorily, Matthew 5.16, ‘Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works’. He doth not say, ‘Hide your light in your soul and keep your hearts to yourselves’. No, no, but ‘Let it shine forth!’”
– Thomas Hooker
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On ecclesiology and Christology:
“In the Reformed tradition, ecclesiology is closely linked to christology, because when the divines argued about the Church they felt they were arguing about that which is closest to Christ and inseparable from Him. It was their concern for the glory of Christ that made them wish to vindicate their conception of the Church of which they accounted Him the Head. It was not only that Christ and the Church were two correlative ideas; it was, rather, that they were, in the eye of these divines, one living reality.”
— Geddes MacGregor, Corpus Christi, p. 22
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C. S. Lewis:
“I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.
That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen, Filmer would be right, and patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin), but because fathers and husbands are bad. Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to be interfered with because it is constantly abused. . . .
Do not misunderstand me. I am not in the least belittling the value of this egalitarian fiction which is our only defence against one another’s cruelty. I should view with the strongest disapproval any proposal to abolish manhood suffrage, or the Married Women’s Property Act. But the function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food. By treating human person (in judicious defiance of the observed facts) as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But it is not on this that we were made to live. It is idle to say that men are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense—if we mean that all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining—then it is nonsense. If it means that all are of equal value as immortal souls, then I think it conceals a dangerous error.”
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“Christian worship, being worship of a heavenly king, is a challenge to imperial propaganda. Heavenly worship is not a retreat from the world, but an entry to the center of the world. Worship of the Enthronement is the challenge to the pretenses of Caesar and all his latter-day imitators. ‘Worship God’ is the central political commandment in Revelation.”
–Peter Leithart, Revelation 1:225
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“We transitioned from the Gospel-Centered’ movement of the early 2000s, which advocated that our natural loves were actually idolatrous, to the ‘Gospel-Rare’ movement of our day, which suggests that our natural loves only require the Gospel in those rare spiritual experiences.
“The Gospel-centered movement chastised anyone who maximized the natural biblical order. They offered pilgrimages towards absolution if only we loved family less and Jesus more. But the result of such dangerous bifurcation was an idolatrous view that minimized the spheres of society for some nebulous piety.
“On the other hand, the ‘Gospel-rare’ movement sees the Gospel as completely dispensable when it comes to the salvation of the nations. They wish to divorce Politics from the Gospel and treat the Gospel as merely a message about eternal life. They limit the Gospel to spiritual realities.
“However, the Apostle Paul views the Gospel, particularly the promise of the Resurrection, as deeply rooted in the conquest of the nations (I Cor. 15:24-26). For the nations to come to Christ, we need neither a distorted view of the Gospel that minimizes our earthly concerns nor divorce it from its political implications.
“The Gospel is a full-orbed, redemptive-historical message that draws people to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and turns our affections rightly to our families and friends, as well as to the victory over principalities and powers.”
— Uriesou Brito
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Lewis:
I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast.
—
I must add one remark here, which I heartily wish I had not omitted in the first edition, namely, That though I do in this book consider my reader as successively in a great variety of supposed circumstances, beginning with those of a thoughtless sinner, and leading him through several stages of conviction, terror, etc., as what may be previous to his sincerely accepting the gospel, and devoting himself to the service of God ; YET I WOULD BY NO MEANS BE THOUGHT TO INSINUATE, THAT EVERY ONE WHO IS BROUGHT TO THAT HAPPY RESOLUTION, ARRIVES AT IT THROUGH THOSE PARTICULAR STEPS, OR FEELS AGITATIONS OF MIND EQUAL IN DEGREE TO THOSE I HAVE DESCRIBED. Some sense of sin, and some serious and humbling apprehensions of our danger and misery in consequence of it, must indeed be necessary to dispose us to receive the grace of the gospel, and the Saviour who is there exhibited to our faith. But God is pleased some times to begin the work of his grace in the heart almost from the first dawning of reason, and to carry it on by such gentle and insensible degrees, that very excellent persons, who have made the most eminent attainments in the divine life, have been unable to recount any remarkable history of their conversion. And so far as I can learn, this is most frequently the case with these of them who have enjoyed the benefit of a pious education, when it has not been succeeded by a vicious and licentious youth. God forbid, therefore, that any should be so insensible of their own happiness as to fall into perplexity with relation to their spiritual state, for want of being able to trace such a rise of religion in their minds as it was necessary on my plan for me to describe and exemplify here. I have spoken my sentiments on this head so fully in the eighth of my Sermons on Regeneration, that I think none who has read and remembers the general contents of it, can be in danger of mistaking my meaning here. But as it is very possible that this book may fall into the hands of many who have not read the other, and have no opportunity of consulting it, I thought it proper to insert this caution in the preface to this; and I am much obliged to that worthy and excellent person who kindly reminded me of the expediency of doing it.
— Phillip Doddridge, from his preface to the second edition of “Rise & Progress of Religion in the Soul.” Emphasis his
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Lewis on natural affection:
First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells. Note that at its largest this is, for us, a love of England, Wales, Scotland, or Ulster. Only foreigners and politicians talk about “Britain”. Kipling’s “I do not love my empire’s foes” strikes a ludicrously false note. My empire! With this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life; for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it; for the local dialect and (a shade less) for our native language. As Chesterton says, a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he “could not even begin” to enumerate all the things he would miss.
It would be hard to find any legitimate point of view from which this feeling could be condemned. As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love, so this offers us the first step beyond family selfishness. Of course it is not pure charity; it involves love of our neighbours in the local, not of our Neighbour, in the Dominical, sense. But those who do not love the fellow-villagers or fellow-townsmen whom they have seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving “Man” whom they have not. All natural affections, including this, can become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service; as women nurse dolls in childhood and later nurse children. There may come an occasion for renouncing this love; pluck out your right eye. But you need to have an eye first: a creature which had none–which had only got so far as a “photo-sensitive” spot–would be very ill employed in meditation on that severe text.
Of course patriotism of this kind is not in the least aggressive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude towards foreigners. How can I love my home without coming to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have realised that the Frenchmen like café complet just as we like bacon and eggs–why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different.
—
Chesterton, exercising his prophetic powers in 1926:
The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back… The roots of the new heresy, God knows, are as deep as nature itself, whose flower is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. I say that the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times; cannot see even the skysigns in the street that are the new sort of signs in heaven. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan – but most of what was in Broadway is already in Piccadilly.
—
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—“free-love”—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.
— Chesterton
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There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few, that will give themselves the trouble to consider the original and foundation of this right. …
In the beginning of the world, we are informed by holy writ, the all-bountiful creator gave to man “dominion over all the earth; and over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” This is the only true and solid foundation of man’s dominion over external things, whatever airy metaphysical notions may have been started by fanciful writers upon this subject. The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the Creator.
— William Blackstone
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Chesterton:
There are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. . . . But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.
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