A Bewildering History of England

I should like G. K. Chesterton.  C. S. Lewis liked him.  He graces Wheaton College's wonderful Wade Center along with Lewis, Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and James MacDonald.  But despite his reputation as a brilliant writer and a great public intellectual (neither one of which I am actually challenging) I just don't think I care for his writing.

Or at least his writing in A Short History of England, the first book I read on my new Kindle Touch (thanks mom and dad!).  He does say some very good things.  For example:

We must put ourselves in the posture of men who thought that almost every good thing came from outside--like good news. . . . I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things.  I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. (38)

In modern romances this is treated as a mere hypocrisy; but the man who treats every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a hypocrite about his own inconsistencies. (85)

Christianity is not a creed for good men, but for men. (85)

A dogma of equal duties implies that of equal rights. (121)

But as far as actually teaching me something about English history (a subject of some personal interest) it's not so helpful.  It's more of an idiosyncratic analysis of English history, a moral lesson of some sort.  But what annoys me the most is how nearly every sentence contains some paradox, some double meaning, some clever reference to something too obscure for me to know what in the name of Her Majesty Elizabeth II he's talking about.  This sentence is fairly typical:

And he remains the incarnation of a spirit in the English that is purely poetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. (121)

The meaning of this sentence is beyond me, as was much of the book.  I may return to Chesterton in the future, but (if I can summon my inner Chesterton) we make of the future in the present only what we make of the present in the future.

I don't know what that sentence means either.