The Brits Expose the Imbecile Habit 2/2

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To wound the pride of the modern rationalist, Chesterton
observed a perennial circularity to their foundational argument:
"It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence,it is you
rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do
so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the
matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of
medieval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that
they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always
argument in a circle. If I say, `Medieval documents attest
certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,' they
answer, `But medievals were superstitious'; if I want to know in
what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that
they believed in the miracles. If I say `a peasant saw a ghost,'
I am told, `But peasants are so credulous.' If I ask, `Why
credulous?' the only answer is,that they see ghosts. Iceland is
impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the
sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.
It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the
unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he
himself generally forgets to use it." (277-278)

Chesterton was not as infatuated with novelty as are many
moderns. He said, "As long as the vision of heaven is always
changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal
will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized.
The modern young man will never change his environment; for he
will always change his mind. This, therefore, is our first
requirement about the ideal towards which progress is directed;
it must be fixed. But it does frightfully matter how often
humanity changes its ideal; for then all its old failures are
fruitless." (197) He argued, "If we are bound to improve, we
need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is
the best of all reasons for not being a progressive." (202)

To round out the thought of Chesterton, consider a few of his
sayings on the family. Many other structures, methods, and
beliefs will come and go, Chesterton asserted, but God will
continue to use the family. G. K. Chesterton asserted: "The
family is radically subversive of the state-control." What he
meant was that the family was the one institution that the state
could not possess, enslave, intimidate, nor control. He said,
"If we wish to preserve the family we must revolutionize the
nation."[6]

The earliest sphere of government was the family; it was a small
state. "The family is the model state," said Benjamin M.
Palmer.[7] Long before mammoth governmental bureaucracies, and
long before the growth of democracies, society was ordered in
simple fashion,by families. These family-states performed basic
tasks in lieu of civil government performing them. Families
cared for one another, they protected from enemies, and they
passed on values and wealth. The family is an adequate
governmental sphere as well. In fact, if government crumbled or
if a cataclysmic holocaust occurred, the survivors would
probably begin with the new state based on the family. The
family is "the ultimate human institution . . . Christianity,
even enormous as was its revolution, did not alter this ancient
and savage sanctity; it merely reversed it."[8]

Chesterton was again perceptive when he wrote: "This is the
social structure of mankind, far older than all its records and
more universal than any of its religions; and all attempts to
alter it are mere talk and tomfoolery."[9] He asserted, "When we
defend the family we do not mean it is always a peaceful family;
when we maintain the thesis of marriage we do not mean that it
is always a happy marriage. We mean that it is the theater of
the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially
the things that matter."[10]

Chesterton, of course, was not perfect in all ways. He
maintained an inordinate antipathy toward orthodox Calvinism and
espoused more ideas associated with Roman Catholicism than many
will embrace. His idiosyncracies were numerous, and some of his
poetry is ribald. However, an acquaintance with his work would
steel many a mind against the onslaught of overbearing
progressivism.

Dorothy Sayers

Lincoln once asked, "What is conservativism? Is it not adherence
to the old and tried, against the new and untried?"[11] Another
British thinker who championed the virtues of the tried and true
was Dorothy Sayers, an admirer of Chesterton. She noted:

It is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the
importance of Christian morality unless they are prepared to
take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It
is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters
enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity
is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist
that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the
universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely
idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on
the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine,
steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal
to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is
and needs only a little encouragement to practice it.[12]

"The task is not made easier," observed Sayers, "by the
obstinate refusal of a great body of nominal Christians, both
lay and clerical, to face the theological question. `Take away
theology and give us some nice religion' has been a popular
slogan for so long that we are likely to accept it, without
inquiring whether religion without theology has any meaning. And
however unpopular I may make myself, I shall and will affirm
that the reason why the churches are discredited today is not
that they are too bigoted about theology, but that they have run
away from theology." (36)

In "Creed or Chaos," Sayers aimed at two targets: "First, to
point out that if we really want a Christian society, we must
teach Christianity, and that it is absolutely impossible to
teach Christianity without teaching Christian dogma. Secondly,
to put before you a list of half a dozen or so main doctrinal
points that the world most especially needs to have drummed into
its ears at this moment,doctrines forgotten or misinterpreted
but which (if they are true as the Church maintains them to be)
are cornerstones in that rational structure of human society
that is the alternative to world chaos." (36)

She observed "the inevitability of dogma," if Christianity was
to be "more than a little, mild, wishful thinking about ethical
behavior." When a contemporary of Sayers argued against
ecclesiastical disputes and "the rise of the new dogmatism,
whether in its Calvinist or Thomist form, constitut[ing] a fresh
and serious threat to Christian unity," she responded: "Now I am
perfectly ready to agree that disputes between the churches
constitute a menace to Christendom. And I will admit that I am
not quite sure what is meant by the new dogmatism; it might, I
suppose, mean the appearance of new dogmas among the followers
of St. Thomas and Calvin, respectively. But I rather fancy it
means a fresh attention to, and reassertion of, old dogma, and
that when Dr. Selbie says that all this is irrelevant to the
life and thought of the average man, he is deliberately saying
that Christian dogma, as such, is irrelevant." (37)

"But," she continued, "if Christian dogma is irrelevant to life,
to what, in Heaven's name, is it relevant?,since religious dogma
is in fact nothing but a statement of doctrines concerning the
nature of life and the universe. If Christian ministers really
believe it is only an intellectual game for theologians and has
no bearing upon human life, it is no wonder that their
congregations are ignorant, bored, and bewildered." (37) Even
critics like Selbie admitted there was "something more" to
Christianity than a reaction against paganism.

Sayers' rejoinder to him on this point is instructive. "The
`something more,'" asserted Sayers, "is dogma, and cannot be
anything else, or between humanism and Christianity and between
paganism and theism there is no distinction whatever except a
distinction of dogma. That you cannot have Christian principles
without Christ is becoming increasingly clear because their
validity as principles depends on Christ's authority." (38) She
continued her argument by referring to the totalitarian states,
which once "having ceased to believe in Christ's authority, are
logically quite justified in repudiating Christian principles."
She argued for the inescapability of dogma: "If the average man
is required to believe in Christ and accept his authority for
Christian principles, it is surely relevant to inquire who or
what Christ is, and why his authority should be accepted. But
the question, `What think ye of Christ?' lands the average man
at once in the very knottiest kind of dogmatic riddle. It is
quite useless to say that it doesn't matter particularly who or
what Christ was or by what authority he did those things, and
that even if he was only a man, he was a very nice man and we
ought to live by his principles; for that is merely humanism,
and if the average man in Germany chooses to think that Hitler
is a nicer sort of man with still more attractive principles,
the Christian humanist has no answer to make." (38) She further
averred:

It is not true at all that dogma is hopelessly irrelevant to the
life and thought of the average man. What is true is that
ministers of the Christian religion often assert that it is,
present it for consideration as though it were, and, in fact, by
their faulty exposition of it made it so. The central dogma of
the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If
Christ were only man, then he is entirely irrelevant to any
thought about God; if he is only God, then he is entirely
irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the
strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a
man should believe rightly the Incarnation of Our Lord, Jesus
Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest
reason why he should believe at all. And in that case, it is
wholly irrelevant to chatter about Christian principles. (38)

Sayers found the clergy infatuated with modernistic
reformulation and faulted them for unnecessary epistemological
obfuscation: "If the average man is going to be interested in
Christ at all, it is the dogma that will provide the interest.
The trouble is that, in nine cases out of ten, he has never been
offered the dogma. What he has been offered is a set of
technical theological terms that nobody has taken the trouble to
translate into language relevant to ordinary life." (39) She
blamed:

Teachers and preachers never, I think, make it sufficiently
clear that dogmas are not a set of arbitrary regulations
invented a priori by a committee of theologians enjoying a bout
of all-in dialectical wrestling. Most of them were hammered out
under pressure of urgent practical necessity to provide an
answer to heresy. And heresy is, as I have tried to show,
largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man,
trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point
where they begin to interfere with daily life and thought. To
me, engaged in my diabolical occupation of going to and fro in
the world and walking up and down in it, conversations and
correspondence bring daily a magnificent crop of all the
standard heresies. I am extremely well familiar with them as
practical examples of the life and thought of the average man,
though I had to hunt through the encyclopedia to fit them with
their proper theological titles for the purposes of this
address. For the answers I need not go so far; they are
compendiously set forth in the creeds. (41)

Sayers discovered "an interesting fact: that nine out of ten of
my heretics are exceedingly surprised to discover that the
creeds contain any statements that bear a practical and
comprehensible meaning." She repeated her experience: "If I tell
them it is an article of faith that the same God who made the
world endured the suffering of the world, they ask in perfect
good faith what connection there is between that statement and
the story of Jesus. If I draw their attention to the dogma that
the same Jesus who was the divine love was also the light of
light, the divine wisdom, they are surprised. Some of them thank
me very heartily for this entirely novel and original
interpretation of Scripture, which they never heard of before
and suppose me to have invented. Others say irritably that they
don't like to think that wisdom and religion have anything to do
with each other, and that I should do much better to cut out the
wisdom and reason and intelligence and stick to a simple gospel
of love. But whether they are pleased or annoyed, they are
interested; and the thing that interests them, whether or not
they suppose it to be my invention, is the resolute assertion of
the dogma." (41)

In opposition to the approach of Selbie and others (i. e., to
avoid dogmatic assertion lest affront be given), she contended:
First, I believe it to be a grave mistake to present
Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense
in it. Seeing that Christ went about the world giving the most
violent offense to all kinds of people, it would seem absurd to
expect that the doctrine of his person can be so presented as to
offend nobody. We cannot blink at the fact that gentle Jesus,
meek and mild, was so stiff in his opinions and so inflammatory
in his language that he was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted
from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a
public danger. Whatever his peace was, it was not the peace of
an amiable indifference; and he said in so many words that what
he brought with him was fire and sword. That being so, nobody
need to be too much surprised or disconcerted at finding that a
determined preaching of Christian dogma may sometimes result in
a few angry letters of protest or a difference of opinion on the
parish council. The other thing is this: that I find by
experience there is a very large measure of agreement among
Christian denominations on all doctrine that is really
ecumenical. (42)

Of the exaltation of rhetoric to replace rational evaluation,a
tactic used in Sayers' time and greatly increasing into our own
times,she noted: "`Any stigma,' said a witty tongue, `will do to
beat a dogma;' and the flails of ridicule have been brandished
with such energy of late on the threshing floor of controversy
that the true seed of the Word has become well-nigh lost amid
the whirling of chaff. Christ, in his divine innocence, said to
the woman of Samaria, `Ye worship ye know not what',being
apparently under the impression that it might be desirable, on
the whole, to know what one was worshiping. He thus showed
himself sadly out of touch with the twentieth-century mind, for
the cry today is: `Away with the tedious complexities of
dogma,let us have the simple spirit of worship; just worship, no
matter of what!' The only drawback to this demand for a
generalized and undirected worship is the practical difficulty
of arousing any sort of enthusiasm for the worship of nothing in
particular." (23)

Michael Oakeshott

Some Brits in modern times have exposed the penchant toward an
unexamined bias for the progressive on secular grounds. Michael
Oakeshott, Professor of Political Science at the London School
of Economics from 1951-1967, provided a helpful definition of
the "disposition" of a conservative. Amidst the confusion of
many modern movements, one that is frequently misunderstood is
the conservative movement. To clarify, Oakeshott said, "The
general characteristics of this disposition are not difficult to
discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre
upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather
than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in
what is present rather than what was or what may be . . . an
appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently
the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the
past."[13] Thankfulness may indeed be a distinguishing feature
of the conservative as opposed to various progressivist
idolatries.

In "On Being Conservative," Oakeshott continues to define: "In
short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely
aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care
for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment,
but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. .
. . To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the
unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery,
the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the
near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the
convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the
allure of more profitable attachments: to acquire and to enlarge
will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy;
the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of
novelty or promise." (409)

Oakeshott warns that conservatives will have a decided bias
against mindless alteration or inferior innovation: "Changes are
without effect only upon those who notice nothing, who are
ignorant of what they possess and apathetic to their
circumstances; and they can be welcomed indiscriminately only by
those who esteem nothing, whose attachments are fleeting, and
who are strangers to love and affection." (409) He reminds us
that innovation and change can also yield actual loss: "A storm
which sweeps away a corpse and transforms a favorite view, the
death of friends, the sleep of friendship, the desuetude of
customs of behavior . . . involuntary exile, reversals of
fortune, the loss of abilities enjoyed and their replacement by
others-these are changes, none perhaps without its
compen-sations, which the man of conservative temperament
unavoidably regrets." (409) As a result, the conservative "will
find small and slow changes more tolerable than large and sudden
. . . he will value highly every appearance of continuity."
Oakeshott is perceptive to note that "every change is an emblem
of extinction." Innovation that is specific and salutary, on the
other hand, is an improvement.

Oakeshott observes that "not all innovation is, in fact,
improvement; . . . to innovate without improving is either
designed or inadvertent folly. Moreover, even when an
innovation commends itself as a convincing improvement, [the
conservative] will look twice at its claims before accepting
them. . . . the disruption entailed has always to be set against
the benefit anticipated." (411) This British economist advised:
"The total change is always more extensive than the change
designed; and the whole of what is entailed can neither be
foreseen nor circumscribed. . . . there is the chance that the
benefits derived will be greater than those which were designed:
that there is the risk that they will be off-set by changes for
the worse." (411)

Most contemporaries are so enamored with change or innovation
that they forget that, First, innovation entails certain loss
and possible gain, therefore the onus of proof, to show that the
proposed change may be expected to be on the whole beneficial,
rests with the would-be innovator. Secondly, he believes that
the more closely an innovation resembles growth . . . the less
likely it is to result in a preponderance of loss. Thirdly, he
thinks that an innovation which is a response to some specific
defect, one designed to redress some specific disequilibrium, is
more desirable than one which springs from a notion of a
generally improved condition of human circumstances, and is far
more desirable than one generated by a vision of perfection.
Consequently, he prefers small and limited innovations to large
and indefinite. Fourthly, he favors a slow rather than a rapid
pace, and pauses to observe current consequences and make
appropriate adjustments. And lastly, he believes the occasion to
be important; and, other things being equal, he considers the
most favorable occasion for innovation to be when the projected
change is most likely to be limited to what is intended and
least likely to be corrupted by undesired and unmanageable
consequences. (412)

"The man of conservative temperament," continued Oakeshott,
"believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for
an unknown better. He is not in love with what is dangerous and
difficult; he is unadventurous; he has no impulse to sail
uncharted seas; for him there is no magic in being lost,
bewildered or shipwrecked. If he is forced to navigate the
unknown, he sees virtue in heaving the lead every inch of the
way. What others plausibly identify as timidity, he recognizes
in himself as rational prudence; what others interpret as
inactivity, he recognizes as a disposition to enjoy rather than
to exploit. He is cautious, and he is disposed to indicate his
assent or dissent, not in absolute, but in graduated terms. He
eyes the situation in terms of its propensity to disrupt the
familiarity of the features of his world." (412)

To Oakeshott "the disposition of adolescence is often
predominantly adven-turous and experimental; when we are young,
nothing seems more desirable than to take a chance; pas de
risque, pas de plaisir." (413) For the progressive and liberal,
"the fascination of what is new is felt far more keenly than the
comfort of what is familiar. We are disposed to think that
nothing important is happening unless great innovations are
afoot, and that what is not being improved must be
deteriorating. There is a positive prejudice in favor of the yet
untried. We readily presume that all change is, somehow, for the
better, and we are easily persuaded that all the consequences of
our innovating activity are either themselves improvements or at
least a reasonable price to pay for getting what we want. . . .
We are acquisitive to the point of greed; ready to drop the bone
we have for its reflection magnified in the mirror of the
future. . . . Pieties are fleeting, loyalties evanescent, and
the pace of change warns us against too deep attachments. We are
willing to try anything once, regardless of the consequences."
(414) More than anything else, the modernists wants to be
up-to-date-even if it means jettisoning the tried and true.
Neophilia (the love of the new) seems to value fashion over
fact, presentation over substantiation, and recency of reporting
over certainty of content.

The habit of this analytic adolescence is further characterized
by Oakeshott: "Everybody's young days are a dream, a delightful
insanity, a sweet solipsism. . . . we live happily on credit.
There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts
to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what
can be made of it. . . . We are impatient of restraint . . . we
readily believe . . . that to have contracted a habit is to have
failed. These, in my opinion, are among our virtues when we are
young; but how remote they are from the disposition appropriate
for participating in the style of government I have been
describing." (436)

The next time some bureaucrat from any realm announces that he
has the secret and can remedy our problems (which we frequently
do not even know we have until the elite explains) with his
"novel" contraption, recall this or read the following to him:
[M]odification of the rules should always reflect, and never
impose, a change in the activities and beliefs of those who are
subject to them, and should never on any occasion be so great as
to destroy the ensemble. Consequently, the conservative will
have nothing to do with innovations designed to meet merely
hypothetical situations; he will prefer to enforce a rule he has
got rather than invent a new one; he will think it appropriate
to delay a modification of the rules until it is clear that the
change of circumstances it is designed to reflect has come to
stay for a while; he will be suspicious of proposals for a
change in excess of what the situation calls for, of rulers who
demand extraordinary powers in order to make great changes and
whose utterances are tied to generalities . . . and of Saviors
of Society who buckle on armor and seek dragons to slay; he will
think it proper to consider the occasion of the innovation with
care; in short, he will be disposed to regard politics as an
activity in which a valuable set of tools is renovated from time
to time and kept in trim rather than as an opportunity for
perpetual re-equipment. (431)

The ideas from these three thinkers were written over four
decades ago, which further proves that truth is timeless.
Chesterton and Sayers were even earlier than Oakeshott.

Charles Spurgeon could be added to the list as a precursor of
this British analytic contra modernus. Spurgeon said, "Rest
assured that there is nothing new in theology except that which
is false; and the facts of theology are today what they were
eighteen hundred years ago. . . . self-styled `men of progress'
. . . degenerate as they advance, and their divinity, like the
snail, melts as it proceeds."[14]

These Brits were correct in their analysis. Perhaps Karl Barth's
flirtation with orthodoxy (in 1924 when he discovered Heinrich
Heppe's collation of Reformed Dogmatics) should have been
detected as an indication that he was applying for British
citizenship. Barth, perhaps in a fit of paleo-orthodoxy,
testified:

. . . out of date, dusty, unattractive, almost like a table of
logarithms, dreary to read, stiff and eccentric on almost
every page I opened; in form and content pretty adequately
corresponding to what I, like so many others, had described to
myself decades ago, as the `old orthodoxy.' . . . I studied, I
reflected; and found that I was rewarded with the discovery,
that here at last I was in the atmosphere in which the road by
way of the Reformers to H[oly] Scripture was a more sensible
and natural one to tread, than the atmosphere, now only too
familiar to me, of the theological literature determined by
Schliermacher and Ritschl . . . I found . . . a dogmatics
which by adopting and sticking to main lines of the
Reformation attempted alike a worthy continuation of the
doctrinal constructions of the older Church . . . I had cause
for astonishment at its wealth of problems and the sheer
beauty of its trains of thought. In these old fellows I saw
that it can be worth while to reflect upon the tiniest point
with the greatest force of Christian presupposition, and, for
the sake of much appealed-to `life,' to be quite serious about
the question of truth all along the line. . . . Orthodoxy may
be but one stop on the way to this goal. . . . Success can
come only if we have previously learned to read the Reformers
as the Church's teachers and, with them, Scripture as the
document for the Church's existence and nature, and therefrom
to ask what Church science might be. That precisely may be
learned, nay must be, from the early Orthodox men.[15]

Notes

[1] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Lane, 1909), p. 153.
The page numbers in paren-theses are to this edition until
otherwise noted.

[2] Mike Piff has summarized a few other important glimpses into
Chesterton's life. See his brief biography on the WWW at:
http://ws-mj3.dur.ac.uk/gkc/index.html. Piff notes that,
"Chesterton had no difficulty standing up for what he believed.
He was one of the few journalists to oppose the Boer War. His
1922 Eugenics and Other Evils attacked what was at that time the
most progressive of all ideas, the idea that the human race
could and should breed a superior version of itself. . . . His
politics fitted with his deep distrust of concentrated wealth
and power of any sort. Along with his friend Hilaire Belloc and
in books like the 1910 What's Wrong with the World, he advocated
a view called `Distributionism' that is best summed up by his
expression that every man ought to be allowed to own `three
acres and a cow.' Though not known as a political thinker, his
political influence has circled the world. Some see in him the
father of the `small is beautiful' movement and a newspaper
article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a
`genuine' nationalism for India."

[3] Several ideas prompted me to cite Chesterton so extensively.
First, I find that few evan-gelicals have had direct access to
Chesterton's own words; thus, this is my attempt to acquaint
them with as much original material as possible. Second, in
order to appreciate the great authors of the pastone of the aims
of this present volumeearlier thinkers need to be allowed equal
time at the microphone. One may well criticize them later, but
this is at least an attempt to allow Chesterton to speak for
himself. I, for one, am not uncritical of his thought, but at
the same time, I wanted him to be heard in full. Third, I prefer
his own style over summaries that may inadvertently distort. In
short, I am pleased to confess that Chesterton says these things
far better than I can summarize. I hope the reader will come to
a greater appreciation of his thought after hearing these
lengthy quotes; but don't stop there. Read him yourself.

[4] Chesterton also argued: "It is quite easy to see why a
legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully
than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the
majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is
generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.
Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were
ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the
statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do
for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary
men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters,
there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are
dealing with history or fable." Op. cit., pp. 82-83.

[5] If one wished to return back to a state of nature,
Chesterton warned: "If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you
must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate reminder
continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view
of Nature. The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and
modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that
Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a
mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point
of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature
is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the
same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to
admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically
Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness
that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the
worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to
Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of
Assisi or George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister,
and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be
laughed at as well as loved." (205)

[6] G. K. Chesterton, Brave New Family (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1990), p. 24.

[7] Benjamin Palmer, The Family in its Civil and Churchly
Aspects (1876, rpr. Greenville, SC: Greenville Presbyterian
Theological Seminary Press, 1992), p. 174.

[8] Chesterton, Brave New Family, p. 37.

[9] Ibid., p. 57.

[10] Ibid., p. 24.

[11] Cited in William J. Bennett in The De-Valuing of America
(New York: Summit Books, 1992), p. 35.

[12] Dorothy L. Sayers, "Creed or Chaos?" The Whimsical
Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1978). pp. 34-35. Page numbers
in parentheses are taken from this edition.

[13] Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism and Politics (Indianapolis:
Liberty Press, 1991), p. 408. Citations from Oakeshott are from
this edition.

[14] Charles Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry (Edinburgh: Banner
of Truth, 1986), p. 10.

[15] Karl Barth's Preface to Reformed Dogmatics, Heinrich Heppe,
ed. (rpr. Grand Rapids: Baker Bookhouse, 1956), pp. v-vii.

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