Saint Francis of Assisi (Clydesdale Classics)

by G.K. Chesterton

They were content to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped by their prejudices; the stubborn prejudices of the sceptic.

A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.

Newspapers not only deal with news, but they deal with everything as if it were entirely new.

Francis had all his life a great liking for people who had been put hopelessly in the wrong.

modern people naturally think of people so remote as ancient people, and even early people. We feel vaguely that these things happened in the first ages of the Church.

Francis sprang up and went. To go and do something was one of the driving demands of his nature; probably he had gone and done it before he had at all thoroughly thought out what he had done.

The way to build a church is not to pay for it even with your own money. The way to build a church is to build it.

it needed ten times more courage to look after a leper than to fight for the crown of Sicily),

For us the elements are like heralds who tell us with trumpet and tabard that we are drawing near the city of a great king; but he hails them with an old familiarity that is almost an old frivolity. He calls them his Brother Fire and his Sister Water.

The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made.

As he saw all things dramatically, so he himself was always dramatic.

He was a poet whose whole life was a poem. He was not so much a minstrel merely singing his own songs as a dramatist capable of acting the whole of his own play.

monk.

Francis accept it save as he accepted everything, as a temporary convenience rather than a personal possession;

I have never been quite clear about the nature of the right by which historians accepted masses of detail from them as definitely true, and suddenly denied their truthfulness when one detail was preternatural. I do not complain of their being skeptics; I am puzzled about why the skeptics are not more skeptical.

It has been said that there was only one Christian, who died on the cross; it is truer to say in this sense that there was only one Franciscan, whose name was Francis.

Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church. If the Franciscan movement had turned into a new religion, it would after all have been a narrow religion. In so far as it did turn here and there into a heresy, it was a narrow heresy. It did what heresy always does; it set the mood against the mind.

He was not a mere eccentric because he was always turning towards the centre and heart of the maze; he took the queerest and most zigzag short cuts through the wood, but he was always going home.

He was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving.