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When Does the Ends Justify the means?


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"Ok, so my reading is not all that it should be but the Father Brown books by Chesterton I have read along with some of the stuff that he wrote about the Catholic Church,have to admit that the mysteries were more fun."

 

 

Eamonn, you speak as if the Father Brown mysteries and his writings on the Catholic Church were mutually exclusive categories.. ;) Seriously though, if you enjoyed the Father Brown mysteries, you would also like "The Club of Queer Trades." I think it was Chesterton's first take on the mystery genre.

 

"The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men's furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same. Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry."

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