Chesterton on capturing your criminal

I have made a new friend over the last few months. The sort of friend who asked me, before I could ask them, whether I had read any George MacDonald (let the long-term reader here understand!), whom they called ‘unorthodox in some ways but really powerful’. Exactly. They have since lent me some of GK Chesterton’s books, which I am enjoying a lot, so there might be something of a Chesterton fest here for the next little while. Here is the first quote I liked and copied out from the The Secret of Father Brown stories (crime fiction is not my usual fare, but these are something else entirely):

... No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about “criminals”, as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.

GK Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown Isn’t that last sentence superb?