The Doc's recent long quotation from Chesterton reminds me of an aside that John Derbyshire made on The Corner, in which he mentioned that everything we thought we knew about Chesterton's best known aphorism is wrong. To wit:

When Man ceases to worship God he does not worship nothing but worships everything.

Good stuff, eh? To bad GKC didn't actually write it. [Don't you think the amount of intellectual effort they spent on tracking this "quote" could have been put to more useful purposes?--Ed. There you go again, failing to understand scholarship!]

Then again, that means that I can claim this wonderful, unattached aphorism as my own without any wild-eyed Chestertonians bludgeoning me to death with a beer mug, or running me through with a sword-stick (or would it be stick-sword, when drawn?) for insulting the memory of their beloved GKC.

On the other hand, these devoted Chestertonians at the American Chesterton Society (upon their house be peace) turned up five quotations , all meticulously cited, that say the same thing in creatively different ways (the last two from Father Brown stories):

There may have been a time when people found it easy to believe in anything. But we are finding it vastly easier to disbelieve anything. [Illustrated London News, March 21, 1914]

The nineteenth century decided to have no religious authority. The twentieth century seems disposed to have any religious authority. [Illustrated London News, April 26, 1924]

A man who refuses to have his own philosophy will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else's philosophy. ["The Revival of Philosophy," The Common Man (1930)]

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense. ["The Oracle of the Dog" (1923)]

You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief - of belief in almost anything. ["The Miracle of Moon Crescent" (1924)]