The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the simplicity of the Bethlehem story and contrasts it with the complexity of the interpretations created by mankind.
Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that the beauty of the Bethlehem story lies in its accessibility and simplicity, as it can be understood by the most humble, like shepherds and even sheep. However, this simplicity often leads people to embellish the story with elaborate interpretations and symbolic representations, such as the majestic narrative of the Three Magian Kings, thus overshadowing the original, straightforward message.
In practice
During a holiday sermon, a speaker might quote this to emphasize the importance of the simple message of Christmas.
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.
How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd.
Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious thought, and the right to due process for composers, performers and retailers are imperiled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain.
Truth is, I've always been selling out. The difference is that in the past, I looked like I had integrity because there were no buyers.
We need a right view of the cross. It is both a historical event that can take us to Heaven and a current event that can bring Heaven to bear on Earth.
I am not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.
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