It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism. No doubt, it might have been Communism, if Communism had ever had a chance, outside that semi-Mongolian wilderness where it actually flourishes.

The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back.

The main mark of modern government is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or (what is most important of all) the banker of the backer. We see the paper without seeing the editor, let alone seeing the proprietor, least of all the financial group (probably foreign) which really supplies and supports the proprietor.

What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously; and that transition may be called education.

Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes.

Christianity is the religion of the Resurrection; in which it differs, for instance, from Buddhism, which is the religion of the Recurrence or Return, which in practice means little more than what men of science used to call the Conservation of Energy. That is, the idea that every elemental force or expression returns in some form; but the form does not return.

I am firmly convinced that the Reformation of the sixteenth century was as near as any mortal thing can come to unmixed evil. Even the parts of it that might appear plausible and enlightened from a purely secular standpoint have turned out rotten and reactionary, also from a purely secular standpoint.

"By the Babe Unborn"
a poem by G.K. Chesterton

If trees were tall and grasses short,
As in some crazy tale,
If here and there a sea were blue
Beyond the breaking pale, If a fixed fire hung in the air
To warm me one day through,
If deep green hair grew on great hills,
I know what I should do.

Happy (future) Feast Day of G. K. Chesterton! He died 86 years ago on June 14th, 1936. When I was still a schoolboy my father took me to a dinner at a Soho restaurant at which G. K. Chesterton was being entertained...As far as I was concerned, it was an occasion of inconceivable glory.

—Malcolm Muggeridge

It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism. No doubt it might have been Communism, if Communism had ever a chance, outside that semi-Mongolian wilderness where it actually flourishes.

In every century, in this century, in the next century, the Passion is what it was in the first century, when it occurred; a thing stared at by a crowd. It remains a tragedy of the people; a crime of the people; a consolation of the people; but never merely a thing of the period. And its vitality comes from the very things that its foes find a scandal and a stumbling-block; from its dogmatism and from its dreadfulness.

Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box.

To me, the devastating weakness of our time, the sin of the nineteenth century, was primarily this: That we chose to interpret the French Revolution as a mere emancipation. Instead of taking the Revolution as meaning that democracy is the true doctrine, we have taken it as meaning that any doctrine is the true doctrine.

The Church cannot move with the times; simply because the times are not moving. The Church can only stick in the mud with the times, and rot and stink with the times. In the economic and social world, as such, there is no activity except that sort of automatic activity that is called decay; the withering of the high flowers of freedom and their decomposition into the aboriginal soil of slavery.

I should say that there have been very few times in history when the idea of democracy, as distinct from the name of democracy, has been less understood or valued than it has been in our own time. How many people could even tell you today what is the idea on which democracy rests?

I am firmly convinced that the Reformation of the 16th century was as near as any mortal thing can come to unmixed evil. Even the parts of the Reformation that might appear plausible and enlightened from a purely secular standpoint have turned out rotten and reactionary, also from a purely secular standpoint.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the skepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith.

The Church cannot move with the times; simply because the times are not moving. The Church can only stick in the mud with the times, and rot and stink with the times. In that way the world stands much at the same stage as it did at the beginning of the Dark Ages.

A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress because in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision; it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God, like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth which it is here relevant to repeat.

The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back.

Nietzsche, as every one knows, preached a doctrine which he and his followers regard apparently as very revolutionary; he held that ordinary altruistic morality had been the invention of a slave class to prevent the emergence of superior types to fight and rule them. Now, modern people, whether they agree with this or not, always talk of it as a new and unheard-of idea.