“But in reality, the more there was to do the better. I never ceased contriving fresh improvements, being fully aware of the importance of strengthening and maintaining the health of mind and body. This, indeed, with a consciousness of continual progress toward a desirable end, is found to constitute the main element of happiness.”
Johann David Wyss, Swiss Family Robinson
“All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind. It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, at nations; It was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome. By making all men heirs of Christ’s victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story, and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming Kingdom, and have endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the insoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest. To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life of vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world sick of brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed no longer to need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace. So molded to men’s wants, the new faith spread with fluid readiness.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ [being a very modern man, he avoids drawing the obvious conclusion]
“G.K. Chesterton – there was a bright guy – said, ‘I don’t take myself seriously, but I take my work seriously’”.
Chuck Jones, the animation legend from Warner Bros. who cocreated Bugs Bunny etc., at age 80, quoted in Maclean’s June 14, 1993
“Moral decay contributed to the dissolution [of the Roman Empire]. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rub themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed. The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome’s fall.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ [the greatest of historians is of course Edward Gibbon - but it is not immediately obvious that Christianity caused any of the things Durant just listed including unbelief or sex running riot]
Because of the infamous crowded, dirty, rowdy streets of Rome, and tendency of cheap shoddy apartment “insulae” buildings to collapse, and people throwing solid or liquid objects out upper-storey windows “All in all, he [Juvenal] thought, only a fool would go out to dinner without making his will.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“GAUGUIN AND OTHER EXPERIMENTAL ARTISTS have devoted themselves not merely to the study of savage subjects, but to some extent to the imitation of savage art. Some of them, or some of their imitators, have deliberately set out not merely to paint Hottentots, but to paint as badly as Hottentots would paint. Some of them look as if they had succeeded. I suppose Gauguin would not approve of his own imitators, for he said, ‘In art one is a revolutionary or a plagiarist.’ Remembering the old schools and traditions, we might answer that the great artists have been the plagiarists.”
G.K. Chesterton “Gauguin and the Art of the Savage” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024) [and if Gaugin’s dictum were true it would leave very little room for anyone actually to do art]
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Canadian authorities’ feeble justifications for cancelling concerts because they don’t like the singer or the lyrics show just how little they understand free speech… or even think about it.
In the Epoch Times I summarize my C2C Journal argument against photo radar and encourage everyone to fight these frivolous tickets. If they’re really a safety measure the state will happily spend more collecting them than it actually collects. But if they’re a cash grab that cost more than they rake in, it will stop. As it should.