A BLAST FROM THE PAST

I'm a bit tied up with other things at the moment so the blog is having to take a back seat. However, I've just been re-reading "Heretics" by G.K. Chesterton after many years. Since Chesterton is very out of fashion these days, I thought the following might be of interest. As readers of the Father Brown stories will know, Chesterton loved his paradoxes and hid some of his most profound insights within a contradiction. In his article on George Bernard Shaw (who Chesterton greatly admired as a writer but not as a philosopher), he presents this cogent argument against the theory of the "superman" and the value of strength: "When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its cornerstone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward - in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link."