Hilaire Belloc on Old Age

It is all due to Old Age, which is, I do assure you, the most horrible lingering (and incurable) disease ever pupped or calved. It's funny that the books lie so horribly about it! To read the books one would think that old age was a lovely interlude between the pleasures of this life and the blaze of Beatitude. The books represent Old Age seated in a fine old comfortable dignified chair, with venerable snowy locks and fine, wise, thoughtful eyes, a gentle but profound smile, and God-knows-what-and-all! But the reality is quite other. Old Age is a tangle of Disappointment, Despair, Doubt, Dereliction, Drooping, Debt, and Damnable Deficiency and everything else that begins with a D.

---

Source: Robert Speaight, Letters from Hilaire Belloc (London: Hollis & Carter, 1958), quoted in Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2014), 355.

Hilaire Belloc on the Mood of Faith vs. Its Act

People said that [G.K. Chesterton] might come in at any time because he showed such a Catholic point of view and so much affection for the Catholic Church. That always seemed to me quite the wrong end of the stick. Acceptation of the Faith is an act, not a mood. Faith is an act of the will and as it seemed to me the whole of his mind was occupied in expressing his liking for and attraction towards a certain mood, not at all towards the acceptation of a certain Institution as defined and representing full reality in the world. There is all the difference between enjoying military ideas ... and becoming a private soldier in a common regiment.

---

Source: Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2014), 253.

Hilaire Belloc on Discovering the Church

The Faith, the Catholic Church, is discovered, is recognized, triumphantly enters reality like a landfall at sea which first was thought a cloud. The nearer it is seen, the more it is real, the less imaginary: the more direct and external its voice, the more indubitable its representative character, its "persona," its voice. The metaphor is not that men fall in love with it: the metaphor is that they discover home ... It is the very mould of the mind, the matrix to which corresponds in every outline the outcast and unprotected contour [sic] of the soul. It is Verlaine's "Oh! Rome—oh! Mere!" And that not only to those who had it in childhood and have returned, but much more—and what a proof!—to those who come upon it from the hills of life and say to themselves, "Here is the town."

---

Source: Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (New York, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), quoted in Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2014), 246.

Cardinal Manning on the Root of All Conflict

One particular phrase of Manning's so impressed the young Belloc that it changed forever the way he viewed the world of human affairs. The cardinal told him that all human conflict was ultimately theological, a "dogmatic assertion of truth," as Belloc described it, which bewildered him at the time but which "came to possess for me a universal meaning so profound that it reached to the very roots of political action."

---

Source: Hilaire Belloc, The Cruise of the Nona (London: Constable, 1925), quoted in Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2014), 37.

Hilaire Belloc on Beauty, Love, and God

I think that beauty and love, and things which people generally look down upon as not stoic or heroic, are the essence of heroism and manly feeling, and this because they are the essence of God as we hear of Him and understand Him. I felt this in chapel today, that the light feeling which proceeds from love or something beautiful, is not a feeling that will pass, but the happiness of angels in the love of God. Have you ever felt that in one of those beautiful churches, Notre Dame or St. Ouen, how one loves the beauty around one so much that one is convinced that it was the grace of God, as well as man, that helped to build that church?

---

Source: Belloc Lowndes, The Young Hilaire Belloc (New York, NY: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1956), 20, quoted in Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2014), 20.