Full of Yes

"G. K. Chesterton delighted in paradox, and so it was not surprising that he delighted in God.....

....Loving both freedom and paradox, Chesterton argued for the beauty of the Ten Commandments, seeing in them not a world full of no, but of yes. He wrote that 'the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but... of its liberality and humility and humanity {because] most things are permitted. 

We are so conditioned to think of religion as being a bunch of rules - of the commandments as being a sometimes sensible, sometime irrelevant, sometimes annoying list of restrictions - that Chesterton's words seem almost absurd. But Chesterton was correct. There is nothing wider than God's mercy or deeper than his love, if we consent to bend to him, rather than toward our own inclinations.  From where we stand, however, we may easily miss the insight. it seems too simple, and we super-bright twenty-first-century beings are living in a very complicated place."

 - Elizabeth Scalia in  Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life., page 118