“The truth is that the Imperial movement going on around us has few of the marks of patriotism. Above all, it lacks one essential quality, and closely connected with the sense of sudden antiquity of which I have spoken, a quality which it is very difficult, perhaps, accurately to define. Perhaps the best phrase for it would be an exultant melancholy. These old war ballads do not dwell upon victory to anything like the extent to which they dwell upon defeat, disaster, the darkness which alone leaves visible the single star of fidelity. The hero of all these songs is not the triumphant hero in the car; their hero is the last man by the flag. The only strong nation and the only strong empire is the nation or the empire that has before it continually this vision of its own final disaster and its own final defiance. There is no success for anything which we do not love more than success. There lies in patriotism, as in every form of love, a great peril, a peril of self-committal, which, while it scares the prudent, fascinates the brave. But this spirit of noble peril and melancholy, which runs from end to end of the patriotic poetry of the world, is just the note which is lacking in current Imperial patriotism…”

G.K. Chesterton in “Patriotic Poetry” in Daily News Nov. 29, 1901, reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

In my latest Epoch Times column I ridicule the government for thinking the solution to the taxman riding roughshod over citizens’ rights is to get him bigger boots.

“no Roman citizen, as every reader of the Acts of the Apostles knows, could be scourged, tortured, or put to death over his appeal to the emperor.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [and everyone knew it then, Christian or not, whereas nowadays I wouldn’t count on most state-educated people to understand any part of that sentence]

“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]

“The problem is what is normal in man or, to put it more simply, what is human in him. Now, there are some who maintain, like Mr Blatchford, that the religious experience of the ages was abnormal, a youthful morbidity, a nightmare from which he is gradually waking. There are others like myself who think that on the contrary it is the modern rationalist civilization which is abnormal, a loss of ancient human powers of perception of ecstasy in the feverish cynicism of cities and empire. We maintain that man is not only part of God, but that God is part of man; a thing essential, like sex. We say that (in the light of actual history) if you cut off the supernatural what remains is the unnatural. We say that it is in believing ages that you get men living in the open and dancing and telling tales by the fire. We say that it is in ages of unbelief, that you get emperors dressing up as women, and gladiators, or minor poets wearing green carnations and praising unnameable things. We say that, taking ages as a whole, the wildest fantasies of superstition are nothing to the fantasies of rationalism…”

G.K. Chesterton in the Daily News quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

“The killing of Salwan Momika is an outrage. He seems to have been executed for criticising Islam, for daring to desecrate the Koran. It is medieval savagery to kill a man for mocking a religion. We must defend the right to blaspheme, says Brendan O’Neill”

A classic Terrible Middle Ages attribution of a 21st-century act based on a 7th-century religion for no reason except Medieval is the worst word they can think of, in the teaser to an article on Spiked [which to be fair did not contain this tortured analogy] on X Jan. 30, 2025

“Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens.”

Jeremiah 10:11 [KJV].

“Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in a swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after four years’ siege, thereby lowering the barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). ‘I have been everything,’ he said, ‘and it is worth nothing.’”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ