"The Heavenly Chariot Flies Thundering Through the Ages"

This summer I picked up Ian Ker's G. K. Chesterton: A Bio again. Modernists  and now post-modernists have always questioned whether the church got it right. Maybe the heretics were the good guys who got squashed by the powerful. The problem with this is that Jesus promised that the gates of hell would never prevail against the church. Chesterton compared the church to a tree that changes around the edges of a solid middle but the modernist is like a cloud always shifting with winds of change. No one has probably ever described the hair plastering adventure of orthodoxy quite so well:

People have fallen into the foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.... It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.... She [the Church] swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles.... The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable.... It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.... To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.