Chesterton Weighs In

It's always nice when a related quote from Mr. Chesterton (that incredible convert from Anglicanism) is randomly stumbled upon.

"So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated." --- G.K. Chesterton

(The following is off another page http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0085.html)
His writings influenced several notable writers including C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers.
Although Lewis was already an admirer of Chesterton when The Everlasting Man was published in 1925, he could not accept Chesterton's Christianity. "Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together," Lewis wrote, "bating, of course, his Christianity . . . Then I read Chesterton's Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense."
Lewis, of course, would go on to become arguably the most influential Christian apologist of the 20th century, with the possible exception of Chesterton himself. The fact that he owed his own conversion to Christianity in large part to Chesterton is a living testament to the latter's enduring importance.
Yet the importance of Chesterton to the subsequent development of the Christian literary revival goes much deeper. He influenced the conversion of Evelyn Waugh and inspired, at least in part, the original conception of Brideshead Revisited. He indirectly influenced the conversion of Graham Greene following discussions with his future wife who had previously converted through the avid reading of Chesterton's books. He had nurtured to full recovery the ailing faith of both Ronald Knox and Dorothy L. Sayers during periods of adolescent doubt. This, in itself, would constitute a laudable testament to Chesterton's importance. Yet even this only tells a tiny part of the story, the tip of the evangelical iceberg. How many others, less well known, have had their faith either restored or germinated by Chesterton's genius and his genial expositions of orthodoxy?

Wilfrid Ward was certainly not alone in his flattering praise of Chesterton's book. Its influence on the intellectual development of a whole generation was summed up by Dorothy L. Sayers. She had first read Orthodoxy as a schoolgirl when her faith had been threatened by adolescent doubt. In later years she confessed that its "invigorating vision" had inspired her to look at Christianity anew, and that if she hadn't read Chesterton's book she might, in her schooldays, have given up Christianity altogether. "To the young people of my generation," Sayers wrote in 1952, "G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator."

You can read a great deal about this great Christian thinker at this page:
http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ27.HTM