As promised, here is the quote from Chesterton:
After that, all men knew in their hearts that she [the Roman Republic] had been representative of mankind, even when she was rejected of men. And there fell on her the shadow from a shining and yet invisible light and the burden of things to be. It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic Wars if, in after ages, divine things descended at least upon human things and not inhuman. Europe evolved into its own vices with its own impotence, as will be suggested on another page; but the worst into which it evolved was not like what it had escaped. Can any man in his senses compare the great wooden doll, whom the children expected to eat a little bit of the dinner, with the great idol who would have been expected to eat the children? That is the measure of how far the world went astray, compared with how far it might have gone astray.
-Gilbert Keith Chesteron, The Everlasting Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1953) 154.
God bless,
Little Brother
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