Those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.