Sublime

Gilbert Keith Chesterton—that Catholic equivalent of Hotei, the “laughing Buddha”—who, though neither a great poet nor a great theologian, had the sort of bewitched imagination from which great poetry and theology can be made. He shone as an essayist and fantast, and of all his many essays the most profound and provoking was “On Nonsense,” the

It had that deeply conservative belief in the most ancient of institutions, the average man, which goes by the name of democracy.

His really sound and essential conception of Liberty, “Turning to scorn with lips divine The falsehood of extremes,” is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in the Liberal century.