“Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.” (pg. 108)

“These are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with me.  But he who has most sympathy with myths will most fully realise they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion.  They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality.  But though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed.” (pg. 109)

“But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom.  Simple secularists still talk as if the Church has introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion.  The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion.  There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.  Mythology, then, sought God through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty.” (pg. 111)

–G.K. Chesterton, Everlasting Man (Ignatius edition).