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| GILBERT K. CHESTERTON |
| �To compare the Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an English squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a hundred-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a civilization but it is not a religion.
�In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel.� ~The Everlasting Man �To say that religion came from reverencing a chief or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart before a really primitive horse. It is like saying that the impulse to draw pictures came from the contemplation of the pictures of reindeers in the cave. In other words, it is explaining the painting by saying that it arose out of the work of painters; or accounting for art by saying that it arose out of art.� ~The Everlasting Man �Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.� �Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those who are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away.� ~The Everlasting Man �Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money; perhaps they felt in their hearts, as do so many of their kind, that after all war must be a little wicked because it costs money.� ~The Everlasting Man �We know the meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet saying �These things are.� It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying, �Why cannot these things be?� � ~The Everlasting Man �What did men really feel about the policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the politician, what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindly for their prince, what did those blind men see in their prince?� ~The Everlasting Man �Whatever else there was, there was never any such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away; but it was never evolved.� ~The Everlasting Man �Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about death.� ~The Everlasting Man �When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.� �When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.� ~The Everlasting Man �Why shouldn't we quarrel about a word? What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them?� �You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.� |