IV The Defeat of the Barbarians
It is a quaint accident that we employ the word "short-sighted" as a condemnation; but not the word "long-sighted," which we should probably use, if at all, as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of vision as the other. We rightly say, in rebuke of a small-minded modernity, that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent to all that is historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted to be interested only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large proportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epochs for the roots of their favorite race or races. The wars, the enslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrations and massacres upon which their theories repose, are no part of history or even of legend. And rather than trust with entire simplicity to these it would be infinitely wiser to trust to legend of the loosest and most local sort. In any case, it is as well to record even so simple a conclusion as that what is prehistoric is unhistorical.
--G.K. Chesterton Short History of England, beginning of the forth chapter, p. 30.
[Several more lines from the same chapter]
Ireland was not converted but created by Christianity, as a stone church is created; and all its elements were gathered under a garment, under the genius of St. Patrick.
It was the more individual because the religion was mere religion, without the secular conveniences. Ireland was never Roman, and it was always Romanist... p. 36
...It is the paradox of this time that only the unworldly things had any worldly success.
The politics are a nightmare; the kings are unstable and the kingdoms shifting; and we are really never on solid ground except on consecrated ground. The material ambitions are not only always unfruitful but nearly always unfulfilled. The castles are castles in the air; it is only the churches that are built on the ground. The visionaries are the only practical men, as in that extraordinary thing, the monastery, which was, in many ways, to be the key of our [English] history.
The time was to come when it was to be rooted out of our country with a curious and careful violence; and the modern English reader has therefore a very feeble idea of it and hence of the ages in which it worked... p. 37
...The fruitful and effective history of Anglo-Saxon England would be almost entirely a history of its monasteries.
Mile by mile, and almost man by man, they taught and enriched the land... p. 39
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| "Progress:" from the sling to the A-bomb! Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 22 |
The important thing about France and England is not that they have Roman remains. They are Roman remains,...relics,...still working miracles! Short History of England, p. 9