Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.
Interpretation
Christianity's influence, even in a diluted form, can be transformative and powerful in society.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote suggests that even a weakened or diluted version of Christianity retains the ability to profoundly impact modern society. The metaphor of boiling implies that its core teachings and values can incite necessary changes and expose the shortcomings within contemporary culture. This highlights the enduring relevance and potency of Christian principles despite varying degrees of adherence.
In practice
During a sermon, to emphasize the transformative power of faith.
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.
Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.
I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.
The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.
Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love.
As breath stills our mind, our energies are free to unhook from the senses and bend inward.
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