Pipistrello's Commonplace Book

Oh Eliot! How can a man who is either a knave nor a fool write so like both? Well, he can't complain that I haven't done my best to put him right–I hardly ever write a book without showing him one of his errors. And still he doesn't mend. I call it ungrateful. C. S. Lewis to Dorothy Sayers, 1942, on T. S. Eliot

Human society cannot carry on without some creed, because a code and a character are the product of a creed. In point of fact though individuals, especially those who have led sheltered lives, can often carry on with a minimum of certitude or habit upon transcendental things, an organic human mass cannot so carry on. Thus a whole religion sustains modern England, the religion of patriotism. Destroy that in men by some heretical development, by "excepting" the doctrine that a man's prime duty is towards the political society to which he belongs, and England, as we know it, would gradually cease and become something other. Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies , 1938