Sugar or Vinegar?

Having just been to a seminar where one presenter lambasted everyone and everything outside his ideals, and read another blog where, to score points, the writer’s sarcasm moved from clever to spiteful, I read Sunday afternoon this interesting point about an absolute favourite of mine. If you haven’t tried to read Chesterton, please do. You can go online, right now and find his stuff out there to read.



P.J. Kavanagh
The Bodley Head G.K. Chesterton 1985
pg xxiii.



“But what is most remarkable about Chesterton, considering what a battler he was, is not his enmity but his lack of it. It is astonishing how few enemies he made, if he made any. It was always to be seen that it was the idea he hated, not the man. The man he enjoyed; and if he could, liked. The more one reads Chesterton, and thinks about him, the more it becomes clear, quite apart from his views, how extraordinarily ‘Christian’ he was, in the everyday use of that word. He approaches most people’s idea of a good man. His brother made many enemies, so did Belloc, who gloried in doing so: “There is something sundering about Hilary’s quarrels,” Chesterton was heard to murmur, sadly. His were not like that. Indeed, Belloc regarded this as a weakness in him, and was wrong, because Chesterton’s lack of interest in drawing an individual’s blood on particular issues keeps the issues clearer, makes them remain of interest to us.
Those he argued with remained his friends. H.G. Wells hearing after his death of some secret kindness Chesterton had done him, said he was not surprised: ‘I have never known a man so steadily true to form as GKC.’ People who worked for him loved him, and stayed…”


Why can't we be more like that bird?


I’ve still got a couple of other thoughts on The Shack coming too…