With respect to Chesterton’s remarks on Quakers, in this context, In THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION (1st ed, chap.IV, p. 81), he said it was “gentle simplicity and truth”. In THE EVERLASTING MAN (1st. ed, chap.V, p. 298), he suggested it was pacifism (“peaceful spirit”).I recall reading in a book by G.K. Chesteron, several years ago, in which he mentioned the Quakers. He mentioned (according to my possibly-flawed memory) that the Quakers take one aspect of Catholicism, and form their religious beliefs around it. This aspect is that of love, peace, and mercy. I do have respect for the Quakers, since my Puritan ancestors date back the the pilgrims at Plymouth in the 1620’s.
Our Lord told His Apostles to go out to all nations to teach all that He had taught them, and to baptize. He did not say that all that was needed is to baptize, then teach about love, peace and mercy by having “the spirit” decend upon you, and then you’re good to go. No, there’s much more to it than that. The Church has remained true to what Our Lord said to do: that is why the Church still, as it did two-thousand years ago, strives to baptize (according to the formula prescribed by Our Lord), and to teach ALL that He had taught. And that is why truth does not change. The same truth that was given before the Ascension is the same truth as that of today.
Regarding the need for ritual, well, God has a right to be worshipped in the manner in which He chooses. Every ritual in the Mass leads up the the Holy Sacrifice on Calvary. When I was a Protestant, I could not understand the need for such ritual. After all, wasn’t it enough, I thought, to just believe? It was only after attending Mass for two years before my conversion that I realized the great importance of the rituals. We Catholics have a duty to worship Our Lord in the manner prescribed by the Church. No one has a right to try to take that away from us.
Thank you, GKC, for pointing out the actual words of Chesterton, as opposed to what my flawed memory had come up with. As regards the ‘gentle simplicity and truth,’ as Chesterton wrote it, the entire sentence that he wrote reads as thus: “Thus a Quaker is a Catholic obsessed with the Catholic idea of gentle simplicity and truth.” (Pg. 99 in my copy of ‘The Catholic Church and Conversion’).With respect to Chesterton’s remarks on Quakers, in this context, In THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION (1st ed, chap.IV, p. 81), he said it was “gentle simplicity and truth”. In THE EVERLASTING MAN (1st. ed, chap.V, p. 298), he suggested it was pacifism (“peaceful spirit”).
GKC
Yep.Thank you, GKC, for pointing out the actual words of Chesterton, as opposed to what my flawed memory had come up with. As regards the ‘gentle simplicity and truth,’ as Chesterton wrote it, the entire sentence that he wrote reads as thus: “Thus a Quaker is a Catholic obsessed with the Catholic idea of gentle simplicity and truth.” (Pg. 99 in my copy of ‘The Catholic Church and Conversion’).
Chesterton then goes on to qualify this statement on the next few pages of the book. From pages 100-101, he writes…“To us, therefore, it is henceforth impossible to think of a Quaker as a figure at the new beginning of Quaker history or the Calvinist as the founder of a new Calvinistic world. It is quite obvious to us that they are simply characters in our own Catholic history, only characters who caused a great deal of trouble by trying to do something that we could do better, and that they did not really do at all. Now some may suppose that this can be maintained of the older sects like Calvinists and Quakers, but cannot be maintained of modern movements like those of Socialists or Spiritualists. But they will be quite wrong. The covering or continental character of the Church applies just as much to the modern manias as to the old religious manias; it applies quite as much to Materialists or spiritualists as to Puritans. In all of them you will find that some Catholic dogma is, at first, taken for granted; then exaggerated into an error; and then reacted against and rejected as an error, bringing the individual in question a few steps back again on the homeward road. And this is almost always the mark of such a heretic; that while he will wildly question any other Catholic dogma, he never dreams of questioning his own favorite Catholic dogma and does not even know that it could be questioned. It never occurred to the Calvinist that anybody might use his liberty to deny or limit the divine omnipotence, or to the Quaker that anyone could question the supremacy of simplicity.”