“The flexibility of the ius gentium facilitated the transmission of Roman law to medieval and modern states. It was a happy accident that while the chaos of barbarian invasion was mutilating the legal heritage in the West, the Code, Digest, and Institutes of Justinian were collected and formulated in Constantinople, in the comparative security and continuity of the Empire in the East. Through these labours, and a hundred lesser channels, and the silent tenacity of useful ways, Roman law entered into the canon law of the medieval Church, inspired the thinkers of the Renaissance, and became the basic law of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, even – within the British Empire – of Scotland, Quebec, Ceylon, and South Africa. English law itself, the only legal edifice of comparable scope, took its rules of equity, admiralty, guardianship, and bequests from Roman canon law. Greek science and philosophy, Judeo-Greek Christianity, Greco-Roman democracy, Roman law – these are supreme inheritance from the ancient world.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

In my latest Epoch Times column I say that when our finance minister claims a call for efficiencies he doesn’t even realize he has no idea how to find represents “a long-term transformation of government” it confirms that those in power think words are deeds and wishes are horses. Which is why they never actually study how government works.

“A real spiritual abyss only opens when men appear to us to be boasting of bad actions; and this is true of nearly all that modern politicians and philanthropists boast of as their good actions. Social idealism is often actually Satanic; in the quite cold and rational sense that it claims to be the creator. To start the opposite ideal, of creatures being creative, or rather procreative, by a direct authority from the Creator, is not only a difficulty but a risk. It involves the probability of some abuse of freedom in practice. When the abuse is abominable, the true function of Government reappears; which is to exclude extreme abominations.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Nov. 1, 1934, quoted in “The Bad” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“When someone realizes that he has said or done something silly, he always thinks it will be the last time. Far from concluding that he will do many more silly things, he concludes that this one will prevent him from doing so.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

“Secret of living? Find people to pay you money to do what you would pay to do if you had the money.”

Sarah Caldwell quoted in D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”

“Gilbert’s history of man’s story [G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man] has the life of Jesus as the focal point of the world, the ‘crisis of history.’ The development of the Roman Catholic Church is the guiding line throughout history, a guide by which we can judge progress and advancement. Science has no place here, other than as a by-product of the spiritual centre, and man is no more near perfection in 1920 then he was in 1290. There has always been a path to heaven, and a road to somewhere else.”

Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

“I got off to a roaring stop”

Me on sitting down to work December 29, 2924 with an ambitious agenda of cleaning up fundamentals and being immediately overwhelmed by urgent trivia in yesterday’s leftover email.

In my latest Epoch Times column I follow up on the question of where the feds expect to find $150 billion a year for defence alone by warning that the overall fiscal situation is far worse than they think including, crucially, how little time they have to fix it.