The next meeting of our Chesterton Society will be Tuesday, September 10, after the 6:00 PM Mass in classroom 2 or 3.

Having finished The Everlasting Man last month, we will be starting our next book – The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This is Chesterton’s first novel, and was written before Heretics or Orthodoxy or The Man who was Thursday. So it was the first expression of his unique imagination to the public, apart from some of his early poetry.

• This month we will read the first three chapters, which is all of Book One of The Napoleon of Notting Hill
• And, just for fun, I’ll add the essay On Turnpikes and Mediaevalism. It can also be found in the book of essays we have been reading on and off for awhile now – In Defense of Sanity, page 169.

I”ll leave you with a quote from Chesterton’s account of his travels to the eucharistic congress in Dublin in 1932, Christendom in Dublin. Although the quote I copy and paste here is rather short, it is condensed from a much longer passage, as the ellipses in it give away. The longer, larger passage is well worth the reading. I just don’t have the patience to type it all out (It’s a couple of full pages)!

Lenin said that religion is the opium of the people… [But] it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God. That fact is written all across human history; but it is written most plainly across that recent history of Russia; which was created by Lenin…Lenin only fell into a slight error: he only got it the wrong way round. The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world.
– G. K. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin