The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that while secularists may reject the divine, they also destroy the values and institutions of the secular world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton reflects on the actions of secularists, suggesting that their attempts to challenge or dismiss the divine have ultimately led to a degradation of the secular realm itself. He draws a parallel to the Titans of mythology who, despite their great ambitions to scale heaven, merely caused destruction on earth. This serves as a commentary on the consequences of rejecting higher ideals without considering the ramifications for worldly affairs.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about the role of secularism 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.
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.
Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor's own nationals.
He [Napoleon] was as great as a man can be without morality.
The end never justifies the means because there is no end; there are only means.
Repentance will not make you see Christ; but to see Christ will give you repentance.
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