That dude can write!

G.K. Chesterton knew how to turn a phrase. I don't really know if anything he says is true, but it is certainly well-expressed. 

From his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas:

It will not be possible to conceal much longer from anybody the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the great liberators of the human intellect... Simply as one of the facts that bulk big in history, it is true to say that Thomas was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it towards experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the window of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of the Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies. 

Never post at bedtime

But I'm going to do it anyway. 

I finished up with Berry's "Life is a Miracle" and started the first chapter of Chesterton's biography on Saint Thomas Aquinas. I've never read anything by Chesterton so I'm looking forward to it.

Chesterton reminds us that God gives us a Saint to correct the imbalance of the age. St. Francis was given to us because, he says, his age lacked romanticism. St. Thomas was given to us because his age lacked (proper) reason. 

To return to Berry, in page 137 he states, "In our public dialogue (such as it is) we are now using many valuable words that are losing their power of reference and have as a consequence become abstract, merely gestures. I have in mind words such as "patriotism, " "freedom," "equality," and "rights," or "nature," "human," "wild," and "sustainable.""

If these gentlemen are right, perhaps the next Saint will someone who can plainly speak the truth, someone who uses words properly with respect to their meaning. 

He (or she) would be an anecdote for our age, this moment in particular, considering we are installing to power someone who used lofty rhetoric that was for the most part utter nonsense. 

Good night.