“Reason is always a kind of brute force,” Chesterton wrote, in one of his matchless aphorisms. “Those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.” Elsewhere he offered the clearest statement of the theological authoritarian’s complaint: “Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes around the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual
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