In the combox on the last post, fpcannon asked for ideas for Chestertonian themed easter eggs. I did a Chestertonian easter egg last year (and plan to do at least two or three more this year) and used this quote:
The men of the east may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark;
But the men signed with the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.
But this is only one out of virtually endless possibilities... suggestions anyone???? Please comment.
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I searched for Chesterton quotes concerning Easter, but unfortunately, I couldn't find any. I liked this quote, though. I'm not sure which of Chesterton's works it's from.
"It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something."
And this quote here could of course be referring to all the chocolate commonly eaten at Easter.
"When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them."
Dr. Thursday sent me a ton of possible quotes:
According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there
trailed through
the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the
funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the
dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the
sun.
[The Everlasting Man]
Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it has a God who
knows the way out of the grave.
[The Everlasting Man, edited slightly]
The historical case for the Resurrection is that everybody else, except
the Apostles, had every possible motive to declare what they had done
with the body, if anything had been done with it. The Apostles might
have hidden it in order to announce a sham miracle, but it is very
difficult to imagine men being tortured and killed for the truth of a
miracle which they knew to be a sham. In the case of the Apostles'
testimony, the general circumstances suggest that it is true.
[ILN Sept 29 1934]
This next one is maybe a bit hard and perhaps ought to be condensed -
it
sure won't fit on an egg! - but it is SO dramatic, and so beautiful
(as
well as being so incredibly accurate!) that I had to send it:
St. Thomas stood up stoutly for the fact that a
man's body is his body as his mind is his mind; and that he can
only be a balance and union of the two. Now this is in some ways a
naturalistic notion, very near to the modern respect for material
things; a praise of the body that might be sung by Walt Whitman or
justified by D. H. Lawrence: a thing that might be called Humanism
or even claimed by Modernism. In fact, it may be Materialism; but it
is the flat contrary of Modernism. It is bound up, in the modern view,
with the most monstrous, the most material, and therefore the most
miraculous of miracles. It is specially connected with the most
startling sort of dogma, which the Modernist can least accept; the
Resurrection of the Body.
[St Thomas Aquinas]
This one too, which is even longer, but connects to that last one:
Christianity is the religion of the Resurrection; in which it differs,
for
instance, from Buddhism, which is the religion of the Recurrence or
Return, which in practice means little more than what men of science
used to call the Conservation of Energy. That is, the idea that every
elemental force or expression returns in some form; but the form does
not return. When Mr. H. G. Wells said that Buddhism was fully in
accordance with our modern ideas, this is what he meant. It resembles
our modern ideas in many respects, including that of being no longer
modern. The Conservation of Energy seemed the most obvious of
cosmic principles; and modern [354] philosophers have a taste in the
obvious. It is supremely typical of our time that when a score of
modern philosophers had founded their modern philosophies on this
solid fact of science, the men of science began to discover that it is
not a fact. But however that quarrel between modern rationalism and
more modern science may stand at the moment, it is broadly true that
any number of philosophies, ancient and modern, have assumed this
cosmic conservation and recurrence, from the large philosophy of
Buddha to the much more limited philosophy of Herbert Spencer.
Sometimes this philosophy accepts some form of Immortality. But it
is always in the form of Reincarnation and not Resurrection. More
often it adopts one of St. Thomas Aquinas's arguments against
Immortality (which that almost irritatingly fair-minded rationalist
carefully ranges against himself) and argues that a thing will never
recover its identity when once it has really lost its form. Nothing but
the Christian Creed has ever had the audacity to assert that a thing
will actually recover its identity because it will recover its form.
[The Resurrection of Rome]
Oh, and if you want something about chocolate, you HAVE to have this:
It may be easier to get chocolate for nothing out of a shopkeeper than
out of an automatic machine. But if you did manage to steal the
chocolate, the automatic machine would be much less likely to run after
you.
[The Ball and the Cross]
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