Here is Chesterton, essentially baiting skeptics–the accusation, very Chestertonianly, is that Christians have more fun, because they are the ones who have real celebrations. The “splendid effort” he is referring to is the French positivist Auguste Comte’s “Church of Humanity,” which was founded as a positivist religion and had a religious calendar, services, and temples/chapels. Chesterton says that “I myself, to take a corpus vile, am very certain that I would not read the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever. But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.” (A “corpus vile” is a “vile body,” which is to say, a body or thing fit only to be the object of an experiment.) So, on to the skeptic-baiting:
That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has succeeded. There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy. Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world’s merriment to rally to. They have not given a name or a new occasion of gaiety. Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptive of the infancy of Ibsen outside people’s doors in the snow. In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth. Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.
G.K. Chesterton, from Heretics
In addition to skeptic-baiting, Chesterton is in a sense pagan-praising here too, which is also fairly characteristic (though he ultimately accuses paganism of despair). Possibly my favorite line in the whole thing, though, is the image of “the many acting poetry instead of the few writing it.” That’s a world I want to live in.