“IN THE ENORMOUS BATTLE FOR THE HEARTS AND MINDS AND SOULS OF OUR CHILDREN, the modern education system has all the advantages of size, reach, funding, compulsion, and control. That system includes both public and private schools that operate alike and madly follow the latest fads and fashions and fallacies and offer less and less of the timeless truths. We can look around and see the devastating results everywhere: a populace with little literacy, no reasoning skills, no moral compass, no knowledge of the past, no appreciation for our cultural accomplishments, no common sense. They are glued to screens, awed by vapid celebrities, and stuck in dead-end jobs as wage slaves. They are wobbly and depressed, but also angry and inarticulate. They think in fragments, they talk in fragments. They are the product of our nation’s education system. But the thing about Goliath is that he is made to be toppled. The thing about David, who will defeat him, is that he sings songs unto the Lord.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023) [including start].

“Mystery and reason: Christianity embraced them both. God, who had summoned light and darkness into being by the power of his voice, and separated the seas from the land, had ordained as well that the whole of his creation be a monument to harmony. ‘It is upon distinctions of number that the underlying principles of everything depend.’ So Abelard had written. A century on from his death, monuments to the cosmic order created by God, to its fusion of the miraculous and the geometric, were starting to rise above towns across Christendom. To enter Saint-Denis, where Abelard had first lived as a monk, was to behold an abbey utterly transformed. The rays of the sun, filtered through windows patterned with exquisitely coloured glass, illuminated the interior with an unprecedented light, radiant as, at the end of days, the descent of the new Jerusalem from heaven would be radiant, with the brilliance ‘like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as silver’. Yet if Saint-Denis, in the play of coloured rays across its interior, offered its visitors a glimpse of revelation, so also, in the soaring of its flying buttresses, in the elongation of its vaulted arches, did it proclaim its architect’s mastery of proportion and geometry. Dedicated in 1144, in the presence of the French king himself, the abbey had provided a model for a spectacular new style of cathedral. ‘The dull mind rises to the truth through material things.’ So it was written on the doors of Saint-Denis. The cathedrals built in the abbey’s wake provided a physical expression, on a scale never before attempted, of the distinctive order that had merged in the Latin West. Modernitas, its enthusiasts called it: the final age of time. They were spokesman for revolution: a revolution that had triumphed.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”

G.K. Chesterton as standalone manuscript-illustration style image in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers – a human ‘right’. Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [re Gratian and the Decretum and the resulting intellectual and procedural revolution]

“If our government were really a representative government, it would certainly not be a meddlesome government.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 15, 1924 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.”

Proverbs XXIV:10 [KJV].

“Over many hundreds of pages, the claim that empires in the remote past had regarded as perfectly legitimate customs that under the influence of Christianity had come to be regarded as crimes was rehearsed in painstaking detail. Provocatively, it was even suggested that a relish for displays of suffering – such as in ancient Rome had been staged as public entertainments in the very heart of the city – had been a civic good. ‘Rome was mistress of the world all the while she had these cruel spectacles; she sank into decline and from there into slavery as soon as Christian morals managed to persuade her that there was more wrong in watching men slaughtered than beasts.’ This reflection was not altogether an original one: the thesis that Christianity had contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was popular among historically minded philosophes. In other ways, though, the author had indeed pushed originality to an extreme. So shocking was his book that it was published without any hint of his name. The New Justine was not a work of history at all, but of fiction. Its observations on the character of ancient civilizations formed merely one strand in a vast tapestry, woven to demonstrate a disorienting proposition: that ‘virtue is not a world of priceless worth, it is just a way of behaving that varies according to climate and consequently is nothing real about it’. To think otherwise was imbecility.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [The author in question is the Marquis de Sade, who Holland takes very seriously as a philosopher and not in a good way.]

“This is a paradox of democracy, that though men can be as paltry as their own most paltry aims, they can also be as heroic as their own most heroic aims.”

G.K. Chesterton in Morning Leader 24/2/1904 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)