More Chesterton...

I realize that a Catlick blogger admiring Chesterton is the ultimate cliche but it is what it is. I realize why I'm so fond of Chesterton. In a word: hope.

In the most recent Nancy Brown Uncommon Sense podcast, she says how Chesterton gives her a "vision of hope". And a recent link on one of the Catholic blogs said that the Russians called Chesterton "the teacher of hope." The poet Paul Claudell said of him, "he keeps always bringing us back to that infallible promise of Christ -- And I will refresh you. Et ego reficiam vos."

Of democracy G.K. said, "the difficulty of believing in democracy is that it is so hard to believe - like God and most other good things. The he difficulty of disbelieving in democracy is that there is nothing else to believe in. I mean there is nothing else on earth or in earthly politics."

He writes in a similar hopeful vein that "There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness, and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real."

Finally, as a postscript, a quote from Albert Einstein sounds positively Chestertonian: "There are two kinds of people in this world: those to whom everything is a miracle, and those to whom nothing is a miracle."