The local Calvinists in our town are generally very fond of Chesterton. This is a good thing! They aren’t as boring as R.C. Sproul and can typically take a joke a lot better than John MacArthur (as if that were very difficult). I’m not sure if they WERE this way, so they naturally liked what they found in Chesterton, or they BECAME a bit this way from reading him. A bit of both I’m sure. Maybe they got that way from reading too much Wodehouse or listening to too much blues. Who knows.
Chesterton himself though often takes pot shots at the TULIP folk. Yes, he always includes them in the body of Christ and as necessary for the balance of Orthodoxy to exist, but words like “vinegar” often crop up. It seems likely to me he had met several of the intolerable Scottish variety.
And we only say once more to-day as has been said many times by our fathers: `Long years and centuries ago our fathers or the founders of our people drank, as they dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed since the strength of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the age of giants. Centuries ago already is the dark time of the second fermentation, when the wine of Catholicism turned into the vinegar of Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted; rinsed out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world. Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and the spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength of the purple vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold. Day by day and year by year we have lowered our hopes and lessened our convictions; we have grown more and more used to seeing those vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the waterfloods and the last savour and suggestion of that special element fading like a stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to dilution, to dissolution, to a watering down that went on for ever. But ‘Thou hast kept the good wine until now.’
-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.299
Keeping the good wine until now. Christianity has been diluted or made bitter. I was surprised to find this language here. This exact sentiment was often expressed during the rise of Pentacostalism in the past 100 years. Perhaps this language is appropriate to every age where the Lord renews and reforms the church.