“If what you’re doing was easy, everybody would be doing it.”

J.C. Watts’ father, quoted in Ottawa Citizen “Citizen’s Weekly” December 20, 1998

His childhood faith gradually faded as he grew up. “Why, if God existed, had he allowed so many species to evolve, to flourish, and then utterly to disappear? Why, if he were merciful and good, had he permitted an asteroid to smash into the side of the planet, making the flesh on the bones of dinosaurs burst into flame, the Mesozoic seas to boil, and darkness to cover the face of the earth? I did not spend my whole time worrying about these questions; but sometimes, in the dead of night, I would. The hope offered by the Christian story, that there was an order and purpose to humanity’s existence, felt like something that had forever slipped my grasp. ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible,’ as the physicist Stephen Weinberg famously put it, ‘the more it also seems pointless.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“If any one of my works were a work of art, it would be very inartistic to defend it from critics. A work of art ought to be finished in every sense, good and bad; it should be either done well or done for, or both. This is true of art but not of argument; for I am happy to say that argument is never finished.”

G.K. Chesterton in New Witness 7/5/1920, quoted in unbylined “Art and Thought” compilation in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025) [my summary “Do it right or do it in” being, for once, worthy of GKC himself.

“This [insistence that all people had dignity, and the most wretched especially] was the conviction that in 369, on the outskirts of a Caesarea ravaged by famine, prompted Basil to embark on a radical new building project. Other Christian leaders before him had built ptocheia, or ‘poor houses’ – but not on such an ambitious scale. The Basileias, as it came to be known, was described by one awestruck admirer as a veritable city, and incorporated, as well as shelter for the poor, what was in effect the first hospital. Basil, who had studied medicine while in Athens, did not himself scorn to attend the sick. Even lepers, whose deformities and suppurations rendered them objects of particular revulsion, might be welcomed by the Bishop with a kiss, and given both refuge and care. The more broken men and women were, the readier was Basil to glimpse Christ in them. The spectacle in a slave market of a boy’s sold by his starving parents, the one child sacrificed that his siblings might have some few scraps of food, provoked the bishop to a particularly scorching excoriation of the rich.... Basil's brother went even further. Gregory was moved by the existence of slavery not just to condemn the extremes of wealth and poverty, but to define the institution itself as an unpardonable offence against God. Human nature, so he preached, had been constituted by its Creator as something free. As such, it was literally priceless. ‘Not all the universe would constitute an adequate payment for the soul of a mortal.’… Gregory's abolitionism met with little support. The existence of slavery as damnable but necessary continued to be taken for granted by most Christians – Basil included..”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [but you have to start somewhere, and abolitionism more or less started here].

J.C. Watts likes to take the “‘path of most resistance’”.

Quoted in Ottawa Citizen “Citizen’s Weekly” December 20, 1998

“Being funny has nothing to do with being untrue or undesirable.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News 14/9/1907, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“You can make your book with roguery, but vanity is incalculable.”

Cecil Rhodes to John Buchan, who met Rhodes and worked for him toward the end of Rhodes’ life, quoted in Roger Kimball, “‘Realism coloured by poetry’; Rereading John Buchan,” in The New Criterion September 2003 online

“Yet there was, of course, in the failure of priests and pastors to live up to their own teaching, nothing new. ‘We are all naturally prone to hypocrisy.’ So Calvin had acknowledged. The flesh was weak. That change – and it was one that had occurred with a startling rapidity – was the readiness of people to accept that the exacting ideals of Christian sexual morality might not be ideals at all. That sexual desires were natural, and therefore good, and that the coming of Christianity had been like a blast of grey breath on the world, had long been a conviction popular with the more aristocratic class of free thinker. ‘Our religions, our manners and customs may easily and indeed must perforce deceive us,’ as the Marquis de Sade had put it, ‘whilst we shall certainly never be misled by the voice of Nature.’ This, over the course of the 1960s, had become a manifesto shared by millions. The summer of love had been a celebration of body as well as of spirit. ‘Make love, not war, the hippies urged. To many, it had seemed that two thousand years of neurosis and self-hatred were being banished upon the weaving of flowers in the hair. Desires natural to men and women, long kept in check, had at last been restored to freedom. Once again, the moving of the phallus in the bright womb of the world was praised as something precious: as ‘the victory of yes and love’. One music journalist, writing in San Francisco as 1967 turned to fall, had cast America as a stagnant swamp suddenly brought to life by the shimmering through its waters of a god. Ralph Gleason, the founder of Rolling Stone, most successful of all the many magazines inspired by the counterculture of the 1960s, had identified its spirit of sexual freedom with that of classical Greece. Society, he had declared, was being ‘deeply stirred by Dionysiac currents’. The ancient gods were back. Except that the freedom to fuck when and as one liked had tended to be, in antiquity, the perk of a very exclusive subsection of society: powerful men. Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus: all had been habitual rapists.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World