7/5/2023 0 Comments Cardinal chains answers![]() At worst, it was something dirty and corrupt. ![]() For him, politics was at best a game that men ran off and played. This partly explains why he opposed woman’s suffrage. FeminismĬhesterton carried on a war of his own with the feminists of his era, who would “chain themselves to a tree and then complain they were not free.” He criticized feminists for simply imitating men while neglecting such high and exclusively feminine callings as motherhood. He traced those ideas back to the meeting between King Frederick the Great, “the Protestant prince who was not even a Christian,” and Voltaire, his “soulless soul-mate.” The combination of Voltaire’s skepticism and Frederick’s pride gave birth to all the “long-winded German theories” (relativism, materialism, communism, and Nazism) that were the enemies of Christian thought.Ĭhesterton predicted that the inconclusive end to World War I would lead to a far greater war, “the worst the world would ever see.” Chesterton only lived long enough to see the beginning of that war (he died as Hitler was rising to power), but the prediction certainly came true. He feared Prussia both as a military regime and as the home of a philosophy that disdained God and threatened to destroy Christian civilization. He fully supported England’s role in the Great War, which we now call World War I, even though the conflict took his brother’s life.Ĭhesterton hated aggression on the part of any empire, including the British Empire, but he especially disliked the aggressive growth of the Prussian (German) Empire. Still, Chesterton’s respect for the autonomy of other countries had limits. He could equally sympathize with the patriotism of those who lived in other countries. But Chesterton disagreed with the war’s intent as well as its methods.Ī “Little Englander,” Chesterton felt a natural sympathy toward his own land. They successfully held off the superior forces of the British for over two years before surrendering.Ĭhesterton, like many others, disparaged such British tactics as herding Boer women and children into concentration camps, where more than 26,000 non-combatants died. ![]() The Boers, descendents of the Dutch and Germans who had settled there several generations earlier, were mostly farmers, but they were also experts in guerilla warfare. The Boer War began in 1899 when Britain attempted to take over the small but gold- and diamond-rich South African country of Transvaal. Chesterton was a patriot, not a pacifist, but he felt compelled to criticize his country’s role in this particular conflict. His response to the Boer War shows his layered thinking. Rather, he was an expansive thinker with a fully formed philosophy who was able to comprehend what was happening and warn against what could and would happen. His ideas were not formed in response to what happened in the world while he lived. Unlike many journalists, though, he was not a reactionary. But Chesterton also wrote about many events in his lifetime with which modern readers may not be familiar. Such writing doesn’t need a lot of explanation. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.” "Defending any of the cardinal virtues now has all the exhilaration of a vice.” "Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies probably because they are generally the same people.” ![]() Consider: "Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. More than 100 years after Chesterton first started writing for the Daily News, readers continue to find his words fresh and timely, in some ways written more for our day than his own. Gardiner, editor of the London Daily News. "He is not of our time, but of all times,” wrote A.G.
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