Englishman Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an accomplished “novelist, poet, essayist, dramatist, biographer, journalist, and apologist” and has been called “the ultimate Edwardian man of letters.”1 As such, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Having attended the international Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932, he wrote the following in his report, Christendom in Dublin.2 His claim: Dethrone God, and the state becomes God.

[I]t is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish God, and the Government becomes God3 . . . Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.”4
Footnotes:
1

The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, s.v. “Chesterton, Gilbert Keith” (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 304.
2

G. K. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1932).
3

For historical example, see Kairos Journal article, “The Church of Hitler.”
4

Quoted in Mary Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland: How the Irish Lost the Civilization They Created (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 2000), 140.