"It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age."

From Joseph Pearce's book Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, p. 57:

...[Alec Guiness, i.e., "Obi-Wan Kenobi" of Star Wars fame] remained confident about the future, rooted in the belief that the essential traditions of Catholicism "remain firmly entrenched":

The Church has proved she is not moribund. "All shall be well," I feel, "and all manner of things shall be well", so long as the God who is worshiped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the Idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns.

Guiness quoted one of Chesterton's "most penetrating statements" as a prelude to his discourse on the reform of the Church. "The Church", wrote Chesterton, "is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time."

[Note: The exact quote in its orginal form is "It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.", found in his essay "Why I am a Catholic", which appeared in the book Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creed, published in 1926. It is also repeated in the form "The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age" in The Catholic Church and Conversion (1927)]