In my latest National Post column I say “This government doesn’t do hard” could become our new national motto as a vast cast of characters across the executive, legislative and judicial branches avoids thinking about difficult choices from COVID to national security and the budget.
“This life in us... however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened. To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish. Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”
Malcolm Muggeridge Something Beautiful for God
“fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which... have since hardened into convictions. First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet…. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling … In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure. The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational…. one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“In nine cases out of ten the human race does not know why it disapproves of cannibalism, but I know why I disapprove of it. I disapprove because I believe that man is the image of God…”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)
“all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain from boyhood. The question was, ‘What did the first frog say?’ And the answer was, ‘Lord, how you made me jump!’”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
In my latest National Post column I accuse many critics of Israel, including in the press, of ignoring that the source of the violence is anti-Semitism, and in doing so of being complicit in it.
“in the Bible, God actively intervened in great battles and wars. And sometimes, to the consternation of God’s people, He was helping the other side. The LORD used heathen Babylon to bring divine judgment down upon Judah. Has God changed? Perhaps He has reformed in his old age? What would a 20th century history text look like if it was written by Nehemiah, Isaiah, or Jeremiah? Would Isaiah see God’s hand of judgment being unleashed on Nazi Germany? ... Was the God of the heavens ready to share His glory with the earthbound emperor of Japan?”
David Kitz Psalms Alive!