[T]he best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it.  … [W]hile the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda.

                                —   G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

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