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.
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.
Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is ? is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.
They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Yeah, it's unfair that you can get judged by something you didn't do, but it's also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn't work for.
Haunted from my early youth by the transitoriness and pathos of life, I was aware that it is not enough to say "I am doing no harm," I ought to be testing myself daily, and asking myself what I am really achieving.
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