GOVERNMENT

'If our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this - that the man should rule who does not think that he can rule... we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unable to wear it... we have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule. Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.87.

HUMANKIND

'...I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.'

GK Cheserton, Orthodoxy, p.87.

NATURE

'The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.82.

SUFFERING

'There is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin and bear it. The objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.74.

HEAVEN

'And the King says, "Look! God and his children are together again. No more running away. Or hiding. No more crying or being lonely or afraid. No more being sick or dying. Because all those things are gone. Yes, they're gone forever. Everything sad has come untrue. And see - I have wiped every tear from every eye."'

Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible, p.347.

DOCTRINE

‘...if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness.’
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.73.

CHRISTIANITY

‘And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.’
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.69,

BELIEF

'An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age.'
GK Chesteron, Orthodoxy, p.53.

THE PSALMS

'I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, "An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul;" for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or rather, the Holy Spirit has here drawn to the life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated.'

John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, xxxvii.

THINKING

'Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.20.

HUMILITY

'But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.19.

THE BIBLE

'Beware of the argument "the church gave the Bible (and therefore the Bible can never give us grounds for criticising the Church)'. It is perfectly possible to accept B on the authority of A and yet regard B as a higher authority than A. It happens when I recommend a book to a pupil. I first sent him to the book, but, having gone to it, he knows (for I've told him) that the author knows more about the subject than I.'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.) in The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.1307.

TEMPTATION

'Perhaps, however, the most important thing is to keep on: not to be discouraged however often one yields to the temptation, but always to pick yourself up again and ask forgiveness. In reviewing your sins don't either exaggerate or minimise them. Call them by their ordinary names and try to see them as you wd. see the same faults in somebody else - no special blackening or whitewashing ... Of course there are other helps which are mere commonsense. We must learn by experience to avoid either trains of thought or social situations which for us (not necessarily for everyone) lead to temptations. Like motoring - don't wait till the last moment before you put on the brakes but put them on, gently and quietly, while the danger is still a good way off.'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.1285.

GRIEF

'People talk as if grief were just a feeling - as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.1102.