Atheistic Style

“The mark of the atheistic style is that it instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging war, which means willing it; they speak of the “outbreak of war,” as if all the guns blew up without the men touching them. Instead of saying that employers pay less wages, which might pin the employers to some moral responsibility, they insist on talking about the “rise and fall” of wages. They will not speak of reform, but of development. The atheist style in letters always avoids talking of love or lust, which are things alive, and calls marriage or concubinage “the relations of the sexes”; as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each other, like a table and a chair.”

G. K. Chesterton – “The Flying Authority” Eugenics and Other Evils

Tree of Theology

“People will tell you that theology became too elaborate because it was dead. Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate; it is only the live tree that grows too many branches.”

G. K. Chesterton, “The Hat and the Halo” The Thing

Evolution, Science or Dogma?

“The whole rationalistic attack on Christianity was in full blast, and had been going on for quite a long time, before it was suggested that the fish bone also could be used as a weapon against the Cross. Europe was full of free-thinkers, and organized into vast societies, especially secret societies, for attack upon the Church, before any English naturalists began to advance evolutionary arguments against the Mistakes of Moses. The imperfect hypothesis of Evolution, the mistaken hypothesis of Darwinism, were seized upon eagerly as weapons by men who had already been all their lives in the war. These men tried to exaggerate and misrepresent the scientific suggestions, so as to turn them into contradictions of the great principles of faith and morals of which I have spoken. But few of them would really stretch so far and most of them have already snapped.”
G. K. Chesterton, The Unimportance of Evolution

How to stay an Athiest

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

C. S. Lewis