From The Spice of Life, essay entitled "Anti-Religious Thought in the Eighteenth Century":

Take the determining example of the Spanish Inquisition.
The Spanish Inquisition was Spy Fever.  It produced the sort of
horrors such fevers produce; to some extent even in modern wars.
The Spaniards had reconquered Spain from Islam with a glowing
endurance and defiance as great as any virtue ever shown by man;
but they had the darker side of such warfare; they were always
struggling to deracinate a Jєωιѕн plot which they believed
to be always selling them to the enemy.  Of this dark tale
of perverted patriotism the humanitarians knew nothing.
All they knew was that the Inquisition was still going on.
And suddenly the great Voltaire rose up and shattered it with a hammer
of savage laughter.  It may seem strange to compare Voltaire to a child.
But it is true that though he was right in hating and destroying it,
he never knew what it was that he had destroyed.

Yes, folks, here a Catholic author is saying that Voltaire was right to hate and destroy the Inquisition ( as an idea ).  Ugh.  However, Chesterton cloaks his near-heretical ideas in the feeling that most modern men have, that the Inquisition sometimes went too far and was too brutal.

But look at what he really says, or implies.  He implies that the Spaniards were wrong to be paranoid about a Jєωιѕн plot, when in reality they were right, as Spain at that time was plagued with marranos.  He also implies that this plot was all in their imaginations.  Yet Chesterton lived at a time when the Jєωs were well-known to have taken over almost all financial power, and when modernism and other heresies were running rampant.  The radical break between intransigent Catholic Spain and the incipient nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr of the Masons under which Chesterton lived, it would seem, would be hard to ignore for someone as intrigued by history as Chesterton.  Therefore, the plot had been proven real.

Are you telling me he was unaware of this?

Also, for someone who prides himself on his literary style, it's amazing how this guy very rarely chooses the right word.  Why "perverted patriotism"?  Firstly, we're talking about men who were defending the Church above and beyond defending their country -- so it is not patriotism that is in question.  Secondly, even if the Inquisitors did go too far at times, which I have no opinion about, not being psychic and not having lived through it, how does that make what they did "perverted"?

What terrible writing.  He says "perverted patriotism" where, even from his own point of view, he really means "excessive religious zeal."

You will see this with Vatican II authors and with Ratzinger himself.  They are prolix yet extraordinarily inexact.  This guy's writings are so garbled and sloppy.  He is so fixated on being clever that he ends up writing things that are outright stupid.    

A few weeks ago we had a sermon about this quote of his:

"The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden."
~Chesterton

THANK YOU MRS. Z!

This man's writing style is SMUG, VAIN, and ANNOYING.  He cannot write one single straightforward sentence, everything is full of winking irony and clever turns of phrase.  I feel there is something ungodly about his tone, something antithetical to Christ, i.e. completely lacking humility and in love with his own fumes.

He is also, I believe, greatly responsible for implanting a pro-democratic, meaning pro-Masonic and pro-America idea, in peoples' heads.  That is probably why he had such a big presence in the Masonic press.  

I am tired of Chesterton being treated like a saint.  He is overrated, hugely overrated.  I was going to dig up some of the ludicrous things he says, but then I thought "Why bother?"  

He was the Stephen Colbert of his time.  Stephen Colbert also says he's Catholic, but since everything he says is through a filter of irony, you can't tell what he believes, it's total confusion.  He also seems to mock those who are against gαy marriage, a ghastly error for someone who calls themselves Catholic to make, just like Chesterton being pro-French-Revolution.  

I have been told not to hold this one mistake against ALL his writings, but this mistake is of an order of magnitude that is immense.  The French Revolution was the most openly Satanic event in Christian history up to that time.

Hello Raoul, I haven't heard this side before though I'm interested. Would you be able to dig out a few more of his doozie quotes please?

I should also mention that supporting the French Revolution is probably a heresy, not just an error.  I guess there can be mitigating circuмstances.

I just repeated a quote from earlier in this thread, Zenith, you want me to find more?  

Is it just the bit on Voltaire shattering the inquisition or is there more?

Now the great gift of a revolution (as in France) is that it makes men
free in the past as well as free in the future.

If the French democracy
actually desired every detail of the mediaeval monarchy, they could have
it. I do not think they will or should, but they could.

"If another
Dauphin were actually crowned at Rheims; if another Joan of Arc actually
bore a miraculous banner before him; if mediaeval swords shook and.
blazed in every gauntlet; if the golden lilies glowed from every tapestry;
if this were really proved to be the will of France and the purpose of
Providence--such a scene would still be the lasting and final
justification of the French Revolution.

For no such scene could conceivably have happened under Louis XVI."

"The French Revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing. The Jacobins willed something definite and limited. They desired the freedoms of democracy, but also the vetoes of democracy. They wished to have votes and not to have titles…Therefore, they have created something with a solid substance and shape, the square social equality and peasant wealth of France."

"The French Revolution was attacked because it was democratic and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats. What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men can fight and can rule. There is no need to confuse the question with any of those escapades of a floundering modernism which have made nonsense of this civic common-sense. Some Free Traders have seemed to leave a man no country to fight for; some Free Lovers seem to leave a man no household to rule. But these things have not established themselves either in France or anywhere else. What has been established is not Free Trade or Free Love, but Freedom; and it is nowhere so patriotic or so domestic as in the country from which it came. The poor men of France have not loved the land less because they have shared it. Even the patricians are patriots; and if some honest Royalists or aristocrats are still saying that democracy cannot organise and cannot obey, they are none the less organised by it and obeying it, nobly living or splendidly dead for it, along the line from Switzerland to the sea."

"Carlyle understood everything about the French Revolution, except that it was a French revolution. He could not conceive that cold anger that comes from a love of insulted truth. It seemed to him absurd that a man should die, or do murder, for the First Proposition of Euclid; should relish an egalitarian state like an equilateral triangle; or should defend the Pons Asinorum as Codes defended the Tiber bridge. But anyone who does not understand that does not understand the French Revolution–nor, for that matter, the American Revolution. “We hold these truths to be self-evident”: it was the fanaticism of truism."

So the French Revolution was based on truth, but they went too far and were fanatical?

"A great part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French Revolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy was the decisive battle of the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have, indeed, destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies, and created a free peasantry in almost all Christian countries except England; of which we shall say more anon. But representative government, the one universal relic, is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea. The theory of the French Revolution presupposed two things in government, things which it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathed to its imitators in England, Germany, and America. The first of these was the idea of honorable poverty; that a statesman must be something of a stoic; the second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative English writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it was that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The best answer is that they were admired for being poor—poor when they might have been rich."

It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution."

Here he sounds like an absolute communist.  He is saying the French Revolution was a good thing, but that it failed because the republics that it brought into being were not led by men as pure as Robespierre and Marat, since they did not embrace a voluntary, idealistic poverty.  I'm beginning to think his "Distributisim" is veiled communism, just like he is blatantly a veiled Americanist.

"The French Revolution, therefore, is the type of all true revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but its fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new as the New Jerusalem."

"A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress because in a gαy moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision; it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God, like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth which it is here relevant to repeat. I mean that in the quarrel over the French Revolution, Burke did stand for the atheistic attitude and mode of argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic."

 
This is the most sinister by far and shows a possible Masonic influence on Chesterton ( in truth, so does all of it ).  He's calling Robespierre "theistic."  What "God" did Robespierre believe in?

"Fanatics, hope for nothing from us. To recall men to the pure religion of the Supreme Being is to strike fanaticism a mortal blow."

The Freemasonic Supreme Being, or Great Architect.  More from the "theistic" Robespierre --

"Ambitious priests, do not expect therefore that we are working to reestablish your empire; such an enterprise would even be beyond our power. You have killed yourselves, and one does not return to moral life any more than physical existence. And besides, what his there between the priests and God? The priests are to morality what charlatans are to medicine. How different the God of nature is from the God of the priests! He knows nothing so much resembling atheism as the religions they have made. By force of disfiguring the Supreme Being, they annihilated what there is of him in them; they made him sometimes a fiery globe, sometimes a cow, sometimes a tree, sometimes a man, sometimes a king. The priests created God in their image; they made him jealous, capricious, avid, cruel, implacable. They treated him as the palace mayors used to treat the descendants of Clovis, to reign in his name and put themselves in his place. They relegated him to heaven as to a palace, and called him to earth but to ask to their profit from tithes, riches, honors, pleasures, and power. The true priest of the Supreme Being is Nature; his temple, the universe; his religion, virtue; his festivals, the joy of a great people gathered before his eyes to strengthen the sweet bonds of universal fraternity and to present to him the homage of sensitive and pure hearts.”

More Chesterton rubbish --

" It is enough for the great martyrs and criminals of the French revolution, that they have surprised for all time the secret weakness of the strong. They have awakened and set leaping and quivering in his crypt for ever the coward in the hearts of kings."

"The French Revolution ended in defeat: the kings came back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo. The Revolution had lost its last battle; but it had gained its first object. It had cut a chasm. The world has never been the same since. No one after that has ever been able to treat the poor merely as a pavement.

These Jєωels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere stones of the street; but as stones that may sometimes fly."