"Angels fly because they take themselves lightly." One of Chesterton's most famous lines. One of his other most famous lines is, "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." But we should hasten to point out that he was talking about amateurs. This line does not apply to professionals. And he says that while every professional calling has its drudgery and details to attend to, there is an ideal connected to the calling, an ideal that one strives for or aspires to. That is why the classic professions, such as soldiers or doctors, have patron saints who represent that ideal. However, in our modern world, says Chesterton, it is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists for the vast number of honorable trades and crafts on which the existence of a modern city depends. There should be, for instance, a patron saint of plumbers. "This," says Chesterton, "would alone be a revolution, for it would force the individual craftsman to believe that there was once a perfect being who did actually plumb."
Dale Alhquist, Common Sense 101: Lessons From G. K. Chesterton
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