Word: chesterton
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Bernard Shaw wrote to Chesterton: "Faith is a curious thing. . . . You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the spectacle-the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a Fire-worshipper instead of coming there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours-all incredible, monstrous, comic...
Normal Happiness. Few devout men managed to combine orthodoxy with gusto so successfully as Chesterton. When T. S. Eliot wrote: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper," Chesterton burst out: "I'm damned if I ever felt like that." He resented the suggestion that modern life had been made as dull as ditchwater: "And, by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun." But to apostles of progress he remarked: "We sometimes tend to overlook the quiet and even bashful presence...
Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories-first carefully turning them inside out. "It is constantly assumed," he wrote, "especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamblike. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. . . . The real problem is-Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved." In the same manner he explained the profound significance of the story of Fall...
...Weekly, Chesterton summed up his view of modern man: "There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox, that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection and dissatisfaction with themselves. But they have not got the elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to renew...
...little tired himself with the exultant paradoxes of logic and the exuberant paradoxes of life, Chesterton fell asleep once & for all in 1936. He was 62. Said his friendly enemy, Bernard Shaw: "A man of colossal genius...