![]() ![]() At last the world had recognized, in Chesterton’s view, a fundamental teaching of the Church that the Church itself had often neglected. Quite to the contrary, Chesterton was an unrepentant enthusiast for modernity’s chief accomplishment-the French Revolution and its democratic deliverance of the common man from his old feudal estate as serf and villein, elevating him to a social and political sufficiency heretofore unknown. Christianity, he says, “was intolerable because it was intolerant.” 2 Such angular convictions often lead to the dismissal of Chesterton as an antediluvian reactionary seeking an ark whereon he might survive the flood of modernity, a comic curmudgeon vainly hoping to reinstate an idealized version of the Middle Ages. ![]() To say that I must not deny my opponent’s faith is to say I must not discuss it.” 1 In a similarly barbed aphorism, Chesterton describes tolerance as “the virtue of a man without convictions.” Chesterton thus explains the pagan persecution of the early Church as oddly justified. “It is a tyranny because it is a silence. “Modern toleration is really a tyranny,” declares G. ![]()
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