The latest quips are from Hilaire Belloc, whose Cautionary Tales for Children is a must-read for every pater, mater, puer and puella. For the elder classes (including your high school students!), The Path to Rome provides a beautiful glimpse into pre-war Europe and its debt to Christendom. It's also a great poetic argument for Pope John Paul II's claim that the European Union must acknowledge that debt or lose its identity.
Belloc was a brilliant writer, though these quotes at Second Terrace remind me why his words are difficult for the pregnancy-brained. A little thick, but so witty and worth the crawl. he minced no words of praise for philosophers:
On philosophy and religion
"There you go, Grizzlebeard, verbalising and confumbling, and chopping logic like the Fiend! exegetic and neo-scholastic, hypograstic, defibulating stuff! An end to true religion!
So it is with philosophers, who will snarl and yowl and worry the clean world to no purpose, not even intending a solution of any sort or a discovery, but only the exercise of their vain clapper and clang ... Now this kind of man can be cured only by baptism ..."
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