These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the expectation for Christians to be tolerant of all beliefs except their own, pointing out a societal paradox.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote reflects a critical observation about religious tolerance and societal expectations. It suggests that Christians often find themselves in a position where they must celebrate and accept various beliefs and creeds, while their own faith may be marginalized or criticized. This tension reveals a deeper discussion about the complexities of faith in a diverse society, where one is encouraged to be open-minded towards others but may face challenges in expressing their own beliefs freely.
In practice
Mentioning this quote during a discussion about religious diversity at a community event.
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.
The whole underside of our society has always been violence and still is. Churches, laws - everybody seems to think that man is a noble savage. But he's only an animal. A meat-eating, talking animal. Recognize it. He also has grace and love and beauty. But don't say to me we're not violent.
The glory of the gospel is this: The one from whom we need to be saved is the one who has saved us.
Fashion your life as a garland of beautiful deeds.
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.
Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?
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