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Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.
The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it.
When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it.
just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare it with the common life of nature.
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.
Most philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third mystery attaches to the origin of man himself.
Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.
Art is the signature of man.
This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature.
Strictly speaking of course we know nothing about prehistoric man, for the simple reason that he was prehistoric. The history of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms. It is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists are allowed to indulge.
original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in history it is a thing rooted in the origins.
The old Trinity was of father and mother and child and is called the human family. The new is of child and mother and father and has the name of the Holy Family.
even the news papers,
normally so much behind the times, have already got as far as the reign of Tutankhamen.
In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique.
It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no comparison between God and the gods.
It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it.
Mythology is a lost art, one of the few arts that really are lost; but it is an art.
the most simple people have the most subtle ideas.
is the Gospel that is the riddle and the Church that is the answer.
If Christ was simply a human character, he really
was a highly complex and contradictory human character.
Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows.
For our law has in it a turn of humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think of, that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.
