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Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.
They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.
It is exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar under those clear and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church of Christ.
It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even if you only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.’
But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else;
no philosopher denies that a mystery still attaches to the two great transitions: the origin of the universe itself and the origin of the principle of life itself.
Art is the signature of man.
Human civilisation is older than human records.
clothes are very literally vestments and man wears them because he is a priest.
the fact that original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in history it is a thing rooted in the origins.
A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.
According to the real records available, barbarism and civilisation were not successive states in the progress of the world. They were conditions that existed side by side, as they still exist side by side.
Whatever else there was, there was never as such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God.
there is therefore a very good case for the suggestion that man began with monotheism before it developed or degenerated into polytheism.
the absence of God. But absence does not mean non-existence; and a man drinking the toast of absent friends does not mean that from his life all friendship is absent. It is a void but it is not a negation; it
Thus scientists seldom understand, as artists understand, that one branch of the beautiful is the ugly.
Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.
The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion.
If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons.
Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it.
atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees.
Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars.
we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones.
It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal.
Christ was obviously conceived as born in a hole in the rocks primarily because it marked the position of one outcast and homeless.
The philosophy of the Church is universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not universal.
That Christ was and is the most merciful of judges and the most sympathetic of friends is a fact of considerably more importance in our own private lives than in anybody’s historical speculations.
Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim.
a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.
Islam is the one religious rival that is not pre-Christian and therefore not in that sense pagan. Islam was a product of Christianity;
The coming of Islam would only have been the coming of Unitarianism a thousand years before its time.
‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’
