Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that true understanding of the Church and its creeds requires acknowledging the risks of excessive open-mindedness and universalism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote reflects on the complexities of religious belief and the importance of maintaining a balance between openness and conviction. He argues that while broadmindedness and the idea of a universal brotherhood among religions are noble concepts, they can lead to a loss of identity and truth in faith, as evidenced by historic tensions where too much leniency nearly caused the dissolution of meaningful beliefs.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of religion in modern society.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
When she read just now to James, 'and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,' and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?
The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.
The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.
I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
The sinless One took on the face of a sinner so that we sinners could take on the face of a saint.
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