The Search for God and Guinness Quotes

“G. K. Chesterton: “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” And”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused,” he once wrote. “Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women?”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“John Wesley drank wine, was something of an ale expert, and often made sure that his Methodist preachers were paid in one of the vital currencies of the day—rum. His brother, Charles Wesley, was known for the fine port, Madeira, and sherry he often served in his home;”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“It is testimony to the importance of beer in their story that the brewery was the first permanent building the Pilgrims constructed.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“Beer, well respected and rightly consumed, can be a gift of God. It is one of his mysteries, which it was his delight to conceal and the glory of kings to search out. And men enjoy it to mark their days and celebrate their moments and stand with their brothers in the face of what life brings.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“I yearned for the simple and the human, for the traditional and the rooted. I reveled in a favorite quote by G. K. Chesterton: “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“I sensed that our age is poorer for not knowing the truth, for not having a chance to understand how the dramatic is not always evidence of the divine, and how the daily and the small are often how righteousness works its way through time.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“Charlemagne’s support for brewing enhanced an already vibrant Christian beer culture in the medieval church, one that is difficult to exaggerate. An example comes to us from a letter that Pope Gregory wrote to Archbishop Nidrosiensi of Iceland. In it, Gregory describes how some children in the medieval period were baptized not with holy water but with beer. This was likely because beer was cleaner than water and for the baptizing priest it was also in more convenient supply. Still, the reference has become a symbol of how much the church of the time was almost literally immersed in beer.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“John Wesley drank wine, was something of an ale expert, and often made sure that his Methodist preachers were paid in one of the vital currencies of the day—rum. His brother, Charles Wesley, was known for the fine port, Madeira, and sherry he often served in his home; the journals of George Whitefield are filled with references to his enjoyment of alcohol.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“find it interesting, given the controversies over alcohol that would eventually erupt in the history of the Christian church, that the arrival of Christianity in the world and its eventual sway over the empire did not diminish the Roman love of beer. For the early Christians, drunkenness was the sin—as their apostles had repeatedly taught—and not the consumption of alcohol. After all, their Lord had miraculously created wine at a wedding feast, the fledgling church drank wine at its sacred meals, and Christian leaders even instructed their disciples to take wine as a cure for ailments. Clearly, beer and wine used in moderation were welcomed by the early Christians and were taken as a matter of course. It was excess and drunkenness and the immorality that came from both that the Christians opposed.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“Historians Will and Ariel Durant have written in The Story of Civilization: The Reformation that at the time of Luther, “a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns.” This may help to explain why beer figures so prominently in the life and writings of the great reformer. He was German, after all, and he lived at a time when beer was the European drink of choice. Moreover, having been freed from what he considered to be a narrow and life-draining religious legalism, he stepped into the world ready to enjoy its pleasures to the glory of God. For Luther, beer flowed best in a vibrant Christian life.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“A banker can be as called and as pleasing to God as Billy Graham may be when he preaches. A brewer can serve as valuable a role in the kingdom of God as a missionary, a priest, or a pope. This is the truth of Christianity and this, too, is a core truth of the Guinness story.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“When an Antarctic expedition in 1933 returned to the site of an earlier expedition in 1929, a member of the team reported that at the abandoned station “there were also four bottles of Guinness on a shelf, which, although frozen, were put to excellent use.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“By 1831, he had determined to leave the grocery business and to begin manufacturing chocolate and cocoa. He had convinced himself that “drinking chocolate” could become an alternative to the gin and whiskey that were ravaging so many lives.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“There are also the Roman Catholic churches that display plaques in honor of Arthur Guinness, a Protestant, for his outspoken defense of Roman Catholic rights.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“In 2003, scientists at the University of Wisconsin reported that a pint of Guinness a day is good for the human heart.”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World