[M]ost fundamental falsehoods are errors in language as well as in philosophy. Most statements that are unreasonable are really ungrammatical.

-October 16, 1909, Illustrated London News

It is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near it if we call it the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to be unlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency asked of a patriot is the maximum that is asked by the most miraculous view of marriage. The recognized reality of patriotism is not mere citizenship. The recognized reality of patriotism is for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, in national growth and glory and in national disgrace and decline; it is not to travel in the ship of state as a passenger, but if need be to go down with the ship.

-A Short History of England (1917)

Manuel ("Fawlty Towers") as Father Brown

From the latest issue of Gilbert! (March/April 2020):

In our Rolling Road column this issue...we make reference to the character Manuel of Fawlty Towers fame. Here's an interesting trifle about Andrew Sachs, the wonderful actor who played Manuel: He also played Father Brown! In 1984, BBC radio produced 13 episodes of Father Brown stories. You can listen to them on the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/d…/FatherBrown_201704/Father+Brown+02.mp3 

The Great Pessimist.*
Daily News, June 7, 1901

Obviously, the advantage of Socialism would be that, if the state were supreme everywhere, it could see that everybody had enough money and comfort. Equally obviously the disadvantage of Socialism would be that if the state were supreme everywhere it might easily become a tyrant, as it has been again and again. To pack the whole matter as solidly as possible, officials could certainly go round and feed the whole people with bread. But it has often been found that in practice they feed the people with insults.

-Illustrated London News, September 10, 1910

"Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave."

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion. This truth is hidden from many by a convention that is too little noticed. Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore it claim especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us that priests and ceremonies are not religion and that religious organisation can be a hollow sham, but they hardly realise how true it is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end. This fact is only masked in medieval and other times by that very official religion which such critics pride themselves on seeing through. Christianity remained the official religion of a Renaissance prince or the official religion of an eighteenth-century bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained the official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the official religion of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference between the cases of Julius and of Julian; because the Church had begun its strange career. There was no reason why men like Julius should not worship gods like Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them for ever in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it had come to life again. He also found, incidentally, that there was not the faintest sign of Jupiter ever coming to life again. This case of Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the first of a series of examples that can only be roughly indicated here. Arianism, as has been said, had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that particular superstition of Constantine might be expected to peter out. All the ordinary stages had been passed through; the creed had become a respectable thing, had become a ritual thing, had then been modified into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the last remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again suddenly and threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead. But there are many other examples of the same thing, even about the same time. The rush of missionaries from Ireland, for instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an old world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old. Some of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe for a moment that they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it with some humour) 'by rather slack Christians.'

Now if we were to dip below the surface of history, as it is not in the scope of this argument to do, I suspect that we should find several occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack about it.

-The Everlasting Man (1925)

....which (I may remark) he cannot imagine either.

Man cannot imagine the universe being created, and therefore is “compelled by his reason” to think the universe without beginning or end, which (I may remark) he cannot imagine either.

-Utopia of Usurers (1917)

[E]arth is not even earth without heaven, as a landscape is not a landscape without the sky. And in a universe without God there is not room enough for a man.

-The Crimes of England (1916)

[H]atred is beautiful, when it is hatred of the ugliness of the soul.

-The Crimes of England (1916)

The primary public duty before us to-day is not to educated the uneducated. The primary public duty before us is to uneducate the educated. For they have all been educated wrong, and cannot see with their eyes or hear with ears or (least of all) understand with their heart.

-November 8, 1913, Illustrated London News

A short update: the "project" I referred to in my previous post has now been completed, and therefore I hope to soon begin posting on this blog again on a regular basis. I may not do so every day, but I will try to do so fairly frequently, at least.

(For those interested, the project I was working on was to complete copying out the entire Bible by hand. I had already been working on it for a while, but I wished the past few months to especially focus on it till I completed it, and hence why I was not updating this blog. But now that I have completed it, things can return to normal, and my regular posting habits can resume.)

Just wishing to make a quick update that I have *not* abandoned this blog. It is simply that I have been busy the past few months with another project, and will be so for a little while still. However, I do plan on resuming blogging sometime in late winter/early spring, if not beforehand. That is all.