In my latest Epoch Times column I denounce the Temporary Foreign Worker program as a bizarre and disgraceful alliance of progressives and big business to exploit foreigners while wrecking our economy and society.

“The follower of Rousseau tended too much to say: ‘I am born in a state of innocence, and therefore I can be as guilty as I like.’ But the new skeptics, who also deny Original Sin, seem rather to be saying: ‘There is no Original Sin, because everybody can be born bad and behaves as badly as possible without it.’ The modern humanitarian believes in Total Depravity without any Fall to explain it.”

G.K. Chesterton in New York American March 25, 1933, quoted in “The Bad” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seemed most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true, they will give us truth which we half knew already. Where they are false, they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there was any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we’re already committing; And their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not in dangerous. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation

“Athanasius then continues, in Against the Gentiles, by stating his aim: ‘But since we do not have the works of these teachers to hand, we must expound for you in writing what we have learned from them – I mean the faith in Christ the Savior – that no one may regard the teaching of our doctrine (logos) as worthless, or suppose faith in Christ to be irrational (alogos). Such things the pagans misrepresent and scorn, greatly mocking us, though they have nothing other than the cross of Christ to cite in objection. It is particularly in this respect that one must pity their insensitivity, because in slandering the cross they do not see that its power has filled the whole world, and that through it the effects of the knowledge of God have been revealed to all. For if they had really applied their minds to his divinity, they would not have mocked at so great a thing, but would rather have recognized that he was the Savior of the universe and that the cross was not the ruin but the healing of creation. For if, after the cross, all idolatry has been overthrown, and all demonic activities put to flight by this sign, and Christ alone is worshipped, and through him the Father is known, and opponents are put to shame while he every day invisibly converts their souls – how then, one might reasonably ask them, is this matter still to be considered in human terms, and should one not rather confess that he who ascended the cross is the Word of God and the Savior of the universe?’ (Gent. 1)”

Translator’s (mostly windy and sawdusty) “Introduction” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation

“The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think – as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries – that ‘Christianity’ is a word of so many meetings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages ‘mere Christianity’ turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. And the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognize, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spencer and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, paradisial flavor, in Vaugan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe – Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed ‘paganism’ of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Fairie Queen and the Arcadia. It was, of course varied; and yet – after all – so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odor which is death to us until we allow it to become life: ‘an air that kills/ From yon far country blows.’ We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such people do not know what it looks like from without. Seen from there, what is left intact despite all the divisions, still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity. I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age.”

C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation

“As the [c. March 1208 papal] interdict was declared, John ordered books to be sent from Reading Abbey, which were delivered by the hand of the abbey’s sacrist. John did not explain why he chose this moment to catch up on his reading, but it is worth considering what he wanted to have with him at a moment of extreme crisis for himself and for the kingdom. There were six volumes containing the whole of the Old Testament. This was a particular favorite of medieval kings since they liked to model themselves on the bellicose David in particular. The sacrist also brought Hugh of St. Victor’s On the Sacraments of the Faith, the greatest work of one of the greatest minds of the twelfth century; since the pope was withdrawing the” “sacraments from John and from his people, it is not surprising that Hugh’s book was on John’s reading list. There were also more esoteric works, including the Letter of Candidus to Marius Victorinus. Marius was an early Christian theologian who adapted Stoicism for Christian purposes: John would have to be stoical in the face of the pope’s onslaught, so this text was a good place in which to find inspiration. Another text that John had brought to him from Reading Abbey was Valerius Maximus’s Memorable Deeds and Sayings. Written in about AD 31 to provide moral guidance to his Roman readers, Valerius’s work covered such topics as Courage, Endurance, Determination and Self-Confidence, crucial for the coming struggle, along with some that John might have wished to pass over, such as Loyalty to Parents and to Brothers. The more standard works in the collection of books delivered to John included Peter Lombard’s Sentences (Quatuor libri Sententiarum), perhaps the leading theological work of the age, with the fourth book devoted to the seven sacraments and to the subjects of death, judgment, hell and heaven. John also received Origen’s treatise on the Old Testament, in which the author uses allegory to explain the text. In the minds of modern theologians, Origen’s methodology amounts to no more than reading into the text what one wishes to read into it, not quite making it up as one goes along, but not far short; the fact that John chose to read Origen perhaps gives us a further, unflattering insight into the king’s mind at this point in his life. The final selection was from the work Augustine of Hippo, including his City of God, a treatise that, amongst other things, notices that “all men desire to be happy” and then goes on to question what happiness might be. None of this is light reading and all of it suggests that there was some serious discussion under way in the close circles around the king concerning the impact of the interdict. John was applying his mind as well as his might to the problem.”

Stephen Church, King John: And the Road to Magna Carta

“The translator knows so much more Christian Greek than I that it would be out of place for me to praise her version. But it seems to me to be in the right tradition of English translation. I do not think the reader will find here any of that sawdusty quality which is so common in modern renderings in the ancient languages.”

C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. That’s why I found as a tutor in English literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if you only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; But hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire. This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St Luke or St Paul or St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.”

C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation