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 men would be masters of others, and no man is lord of himself.
The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.
Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.
...Where and when God finds you ready, he must act and overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure, the sun must overflow into it and cannot refrain from doing that.
To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.
...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.
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