Ken Trainor writes of his lukewarm soul in the Wednesday Journal (Oak Park, IL): Why I do, and don't, go to church. Joseph Wemhoff responds beautifully in order to save others from being sucked into Trainor's mire: Church wins in Catholic Church vs. Ken Trainor. Wemhoff sums up with a quotation from G.K. Chesterton: "On five occasions in history the Church has gone to the dogs, but on each occasion, it was the dogs that died."
Can a reader point out the source of this quote?
From memory (google would just be cheating) the quote's from part II of The Everlasting Man.
ReplyDelete-James A.
Thank you, James! you are the winner.
ReplyDeleteGoogle doesn't work well in this case. You'll find many people loosely quoting GKC with no reference -- because, as usual, he didn't say it quite that way. Here is the full quote from TEM:
"At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died."
and it continues: "How complete was the collapse and how strange the reversal we can only see in detail in the case nearest to our own time."
Of course Chesterton may have written this idea several times in several different ways in ILN columns. I don't know.