May

THIS is the laughing-eyed amongst them all: 
My lady's month. A season of young things. 
She rules the light with harmony, and brings 
The year's first green upon the beeches tall. 
How often, where long creepers wind and fall 
Through the deep woods in noonday wanderings, 
I’ve heard the month, when she to echo sings, 
I've heard the month make merry madrigal. 

How often, bosomed in the breathing strong 
Of mosses and young flowerets, have I lain 
And watched the clouds, and caught the sheltered song - 
Which it were more than life to hear again - 
Of those small birds that pipe it all day long 
Not far from Marly by the memoried Seine.

~Hilaire Belloc

Allegories of the Months: May. Gothic Sculptor, Italian.
Stone, mid-13th century; Basilica di San Marco, Venice

"The family...is more important than the state"

MEN cannot live as free citizens, capable of free contract, enjoying economic liberty, feeling their lives secure, unless they have property. By such laws as shall put property into many hands, until at least a determining number of citizens own, can society be saved. In no other way can it be saved, unless we call a return to slavery salvation.

The family is the true unit of the state, and is more important than the state. The state exists for the family, not the family for the state. Property is necessary for its normal and healthy being.

Men labor for sustenance and produce sustenance with certain instruments. Over those instruments they who labor should have control, that is, property.

Some activities function best — or can only function — in large groups. In these cases there may be shareholding – but the shares held as property. When monopoly is inevitable, by all means let it be controlled by the state, but first be certain that it is inevitable, and if you find it rising as an artificial growth, cut it down at once. A society built on ownership safeguarded by corporate rules, will restore to us our “Daily Bread” which we have lost. Immediate necessities must be relieved for the moment; but our aim should be a stable society in a contented world. How that may be reached is the subject of what follows.

~Hilaire Belloc: The Way Out, Chap. 1.—To Begin With.

@ Amazon

"The gods of the New Paganism"

“MEN do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism.”

~Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic.

"Suppressed in the principal great official papers"

"MEN gradually came to notice that one thing after another of great public interest, sometimes of vital public interest, was deliberately suppressed in the principal great official papers, and that positive falsehoods were increasingly suggested, or stated."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Free Press, XI, B.

"The mountains from their heights reveal to us two truths"

"And this is a peculiar thing I have noticed in all mountains, and have never been able to understand ─ namely, that if you draw a plan or section to scale, your mountain does not seem a very important thing. One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in one's hand ─ yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the distances one views from them, they ought to claim no such effect, and that they can produce that effect is related to another thing ─ the way in which they exaggerate their own steepness."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Path to Rome. 

Photo: Grimsel Pass

"But with what religion can Science conflict"

“YOU can hardly get an allusion to the evolutionist writers (in this country it is always Darwin) without the same idea cropping up: “The Conflict of Science with Religion.” But with what religion can Science conflict save Bibliolatry? On every side the recent presence of that strange worship—and even its present lingering—is taken for granted.”

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals.

On St. Patrick

"WE know that among the marks of holiness is the working of miracles. Ireland is the greatest miracle any saint ever worked. It is a miracle and a nexus of miracles. Among other miracles it is a nation raised from the dead."

~Hilaire Belloc: St. Patrick.
Read the complete essay here.