"The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too little."

They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs—the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too little.

-Robert Browning (1903)

"Our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to those we love."

Our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to those we love.

-Robert Browning (1903)

"The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. "

But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism -- the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence -- it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, "Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious"; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say "a peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous." If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is -- that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.

-Orthodoxy (1908)

"... the modern world will simply be given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage to do a nasty thing in a nice way."

If the modern world will not insist on having some sharp and definite moral law, capable of resisting the counter-attractions of art and humour, the modern world will simply be given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage to do a nasty thing in a nice way. Every murderer who can murder entertainingly will be allowed to murder. Every burglar who burgles in really humorous attitudes will burgle as much as he likes.

There is another case of the thing that I mean. Why on earth do the newspapers, in describing a dynamite outrage or any other political assassination, call it a "dastardly outrage" or a cowardly outrage? It is perfectly evident that it is not dastardly in the least. It is perfectly evident that it is about as cowardly as the Christians going to the lions. The man who does it exposes himself to the chance of being torn in pieces by two thousand people. What the thing is, is not cowardly, but profoundly and detestably wicked. The man who does it is very infamous and very brave. But, again, the explanation is that our modern Press would rather appeal to physical arrogance, or to anything, rather than appeal to right and wrong.

-All Things Considered (1908)

"Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed."

For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation—it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.

Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope—the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of human history—that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.

-The Defendant (1901)

"For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green."

The Rolling English Road

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road,
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire,
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread,
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

-The Flying Inn (1914)

"In short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth."

The average autochthonous Irishman is close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. In short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth.

-George Bernard Shaw (1909)

"...the philosophy of facts is anterior to the facts themselves. In due time we come to the fact, the Incarnation; but in the beginning was the Word."

Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.

G. K. C.

The Problem of a Preface

A peculiar difficulty arrests the writer of this rough study at the very start. Many people know Mr. Bernard Shaw chiefly as a man who would write a very long preface even to a very short play. And there is truth in the idea; he is indeed a very prefatory sort of person. He always gives the explanation before the incident; but so, for the matter of that, does the Gospel of St. John. For Bernard Shaw, as for the mystics, Christian and heathen (and Shaw is best described as a heathen mystic), the philosophy of facts is anterior to the facts themselves. In due time we come to the fact, the Incarnation; but in the beginning was the Word.

-George Bernard Shaw (1909)

In a generation or so [Marxism] will have gone into the limbo of most heresies...But meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution"

The system of Marx is as logical as that of Calvin, and as limited as that of Calvin. In a generation or so it will have gone into the limbo of most heresies, along with the heresy of Calvin. But meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution, just as the other poisoned the English Revolution. It will have had to cut across all the traditions of Holy Russia, exactly as the other had to cut across all the traditions of Merry England. It forces men to an unnatural war against the popular idea of Easter, just as the other forced them to an unnatural war against the popular idea of Christmas. The movement is forced, almost against its will, to take a superior tone towards the peasant glorified by Tolstoy, as the other movement did towards the play-actors made splendid by the tradition of Shakespeare. The moral is that the working classes ought to fight for freedom and not a formula, even if it happens to be held by the intellectuals who lead them in the fight. They should state their very real rights as rights, and their very real wrongs as wrongs; and not confuse them with something which some professor thinks right and the next professor will prove wrong. The great wrong of our history was that all property was taken from the people, and the human remedy for it is to make property a common experience among the people. Men want houses, they want land, they want leisure and liberty, they want the self-respect of independence, and men will always want these things. They will not always want books of Marxian economics, any more than they want books of Calvinistic theology. What they do want is something much more like the destruction of the proletariat than the dictatorship of the proletariat. For it is the destruction of the slave and the creation of the citizen.

-July 12, 1919, Illustrated London News

GKC on the subjects of the Eucharist and purgatory

G.K. Chesterton, commenting on the Eucharist in an article which appeared in Good Housekeeping in 1932:

If I am to answer the question, ‘How would Christ solve modern problems if He were on earth today’, I must answer it plainly; and for those of my faith there is only one answer. Christ is on earth today; alive on a thousand altars; and He does solve people’s problems exactly as He did when He was on earth in the more ordinary sense. That is, He solves the problems of the limited number of people who choose of their own free will to listen to Him.

Also, GKC humurously replying in G.K.'s Weekly (April 11, 1925) to an anti-Catholic attack by the Home Secretary, commenting on purgatory:

The Home Secretary is reported as saying, ‘We want no priestly interference, we ask for no purgatory, and we will submit to no compulsory confessional.’ The last clause of this declaration is especially a great relief to our minds. No longer shall we see a policeman seizing a man in the street by the scruff of the neck and dragging him to the nearest confessional-box. No longer will our love of liberty be outraged by the sinister bulk of the Black Maria taking its daily gang of compulsory penitents to Westminster Cathedral…But the passage that interests me…is the singular phrase that comes before it….the very remarkable phrase ‘We ask for no purgatory’…It seems to imply that when Sir William reaches the gates of another world, St Peter or some well-trained angel will say to him in a slightly lowered voice, in the manner of a well-trained butler, ‘Would you be requiring a purgatory?’

…it never occurs to Sir William Joynson-Hicks that…Purgatory may exist whether he likes it or not. If it be true, however incredible it may seem, that the powers ruling the universe think that a politician or a lawyer can reach the point of death, without being in that perfect ecstasy of purity that can see God and live- why then there may be cosmic conditions corresponding to that paradox, and there is an end of it. It may be obvious to us that the politician is already utterly sinless, at one with the saints. It may be evident to us that the lawyer is already utterly selfless, filled only with God and forgetful of the very meaning of gain. But if the cosmic power holds that there are still some strange finishing touches, beyond our fancy, to put to his perfection, then certainly there will be some cosmic provision for that mysterious completion of the seemingly complete. The stars are not clean in His sight and His angels He chargeth with folly; and if He should decide that even in a Home Secretary there is room for improvement, we can but admit that omniscience can heal the defect that we cannot even see.

"The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't."

The truth is there are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't. As I know nothing about the case of medical science, I will take the parallel case of the study I do slightly understand- the study of literature. There is one kind of writer who beats a drum, wears spangles, stands on his head until he has collected a crowd, and then tells them something quite sincere and generally quite true. There is the other man, who observes all the rules, exhibits all the dignities and decencies, and then says nothing at all in the most modest and gentlemanlike way. Mr. Bernard Shaw, for instance, is a case of the charlatan who has something to say- the cheapjack who has something to sell. He is the quack who can cure you. In the same way Doctor Emil Reich is the charlatan who has something to say- he is the quack who can cure you. I shall probably not be permitted to give examples of the other kind of charlatan, who has nothing to say; of the solemn and responsible quack who cannot cure you. There are plenty of them among Dons and Cabinet Ministers.

-February 15, 1908, Illustrated London News

G.K. Chesterton on Dan Brown: The Interview

G.K. Chesterton on Dan Brown: The Interview

Very cleverly done! :-)