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Much of what G.K. Chesterton wrote was timeless.

"He is not of our time, but of all times," wrote A.G. Gardiner, editor of the London Daily News. More than 100 years after Chesterton first started writing for the Daily News, readers continue to find his words fresh and timely, in some ways written more for our day than his own. Consider:

"Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it."

"Defending any of the cardinal virtues now has all the exhilaration of a vice."

"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."

Such writing doesn't need a lot of explanation. But Chesterton also wrote about many events in his lifetime with which modern readers may not be familiar.

Unlike many journalists, though, he was not a reactionary. His ideas were not formed in response to what happened in the world while he lived. Rather, he was an expansive thinker with a fully formed philosophy who was able to comprehend what was happening and warn against what could and would happen.

His response to the Boer War shows his layered thinking. Chesterton was a patriot, not a pacifist, but he felt compelled to criticize his country's role in this particular conflict.

The Boer War began in 1899 when Britain attempted to take over the small but gold- and diamond-rich South African country of Transvaal. The Boers, descendents of the Dutch and Germans who had settled there several generations earlier, were mostly farmers, but they were also experts in guerilla warfare. They successfully held off the superior forces of the British for over two years before surrendering.

Chesterton, like many others, disparaged such British tactics as herding Boer women and children into concentration camps, where more than 26,000 non-combatants died. But Chesterton disagreed with the war's intent as well as its methods.

A "Little Englander," Chesterton felt a natural sympathy toward his own land. He could equally sympathize with the patriotism of those who lived in other countries.

Still, Chesterton's respect for the autonomy of other countries had limits. He fully supported England's role in the Great War, which we now call World War I, even though the conflict took his brother's life.

Chesterton hated aggression on the part of any empire, including the British Empire, but he especially disliked the aggressive growth of the Prussian (German) Empire. He feared Prussia both as a military regime and as the home of a philosophy that disdained God and threatened to destroy Christian civilization.

He traced those ideas back to the meeting between King Frederick the Great, "the Protestant prince who was not even a Christian," and Voltaire, his "soulless soul-mate." The combination of Voltaire's skepticism and Frederick's pride gave birth to all the "long-winded German theories" (relativism, materialism, communism, and Nazism) that were the enemies of Christian thought.

Chesterton predicted that the inconclusive end to World War I would lead to a far greater war, "the worst the world would ever see." Chesterton only lived long enough to see the beginning of that war (he died as Hitler was rising to power), but the prediction certainly came true.

Chesterton carried on a war of his own with the feminists of his era, who would "chain themselves to a tree and then complain they were not free." He criticized feminists for simply imitating men while neglecting such high and exclusively feminine callings as motherhood.

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