"Heretics all"

Heretics all, whoever you may be,

In Tarbes or Nîmes, or over the sea,

You never shall have good words from me.

Caritas non conturbat me.

But Catholic men that live upon wine

Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;

Wherever I travel I find it so.

Benedicamus Domino.

~Hilaire Belloc: in The Path to Rome

On Gilbert Chesterton

"ALL men one may say, or very nearly all men, have one leading moral defect.  Few have one leading Christian virtue. That of Gilbert Chesterton was unmistakably the virtue of Christian charity:  a virtue especially rare in writing men, and rarest of all in such of them as have a pursuing appetite for controversy—that is, for bolting out the truth."

~Hilaire Belloc: On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters.

(See the complete essay here)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

AUGUST

The soldier month, the bulwark of the year, 
That never more shall hear such victories told; 
He stands apparent with his heaven-high spear, 
And helmeted of grand Etruscan gold. 
Our harvest is the bounty he has won, 
The loot his fiery temper takes by strength. 
Oh! Paladin of the Imperial sun! 
Oh! crown of all the seasons come at length! 

This is sheer manhood; this is Charlemagne, 
When he with his wide host came conquering home 
From vengeance under Roncesvalles ta'en. 
Or when his bramble beard flaked red with foam 
Of bivouac wine-cups on the Lombard plain, 
What time he swept to grasp the world at Rome.

~Hilaire Belloc

Emperor Charlemagne, by Albrecht Dϋrer.
Oil on lindenwood, c. 1512;
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.