In Orthodoxy he said this was the gigantic secret of the Christian: joy. The Man Who Was Thursday, the novel Chesterton wrote, in which he explored the meaning of his own suffering.
My attraction to Chesterton began, I was home-educated all my life, and I think if there was one author I owe my education to, it would be Chesterton, his joy, if anyone, if any author, any character in history, I know just in his own person and in his writings, the way he carried himself, just -- he encapsulated how wonderful, what a happy thing it is to be a Christian.
Standing at six foot four inches and weighing 300 pounds, Chesterton was a big man, the same man who cleverly remarked, that the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried. Well, his contribution to society was much bigger than himself.
G.K. Chesterton was born in England in the late 19th century.
Chesterton was a prolific writer, with hundreds of books or stories, and over 4,000 essays, all marked by his style of great wit and humor. But Chesterton didn't just write; he debated with the greatest intellectuals of his time, like George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. He argued passionately against 20th century ills, like materialism, scientific determinism, moral relativism. He defended the common man and common sense. He defended the poor, the family, beauty, and Christianity.
"Chesterton said that we live in an age of uncommon nonsense, and that is so true, so many people say in the news -- you see, they are talking around things, in the news media, the news corporations are able to talk complete lies -- you need the most basic common sense to think through things. Chesterton was a man of great common sense, and he had a huge command of the English language; he was able to express himself very well. He uses a lot of paradoxes, one of the ways he uses common sense, to point out hidden truths."
Some people may know him by his popular priest-detective series, "Father Brown" or by the book that contributed to C.S. Lewis' conversion to Christianity, The Everlasting Man. Or sadly, like most, they've never heard of Chesterton at all.
"I believe that Chesterton represents a tradition of renewal for the Church in the modern world. The mission of our Chesterton Institute was expressed by T.S. Eliot, a great admirer of Chesterton, and at the time of Chesterton's death, Eliot wrote, that it was important to continue in our day the work that Chesterton began in his. So the Chesterton Institute seeks to continue that work."
Now I know many other writers spoke against the same things Chesterton spoke about, --against-- moral relativism, secularism, social injusticies. Now why specifically him?
Perhaps the importance of Chesterton would be better understood, if we thought of a writer who continued Chesterton's work. C.S. Lewis regarded himself as a disciple of Chesterton. Chesterton believed that what people needed more than anything, was to recover a sense of wonder, that is, to discover the presence of God in the world from which God seemed to be absent. He said that to find God means finding good. And finding the good in people is to find God. He said this requires a special kind of insight. Chesterton once wrote that he gave a little child a gift of a picture book. Here was his advice to the child. He said, "Don't believe in anything that can't be told in colored pictures, through the imagination."
So a lot of Chesterton's writing is this indirect evangelization, He tells a story; he writes a poem, and in that he hides Christian truth. This year, in 2008, is the 100th anniversary of the writing of one of Chesterton's best novels, The Man Who Was Thursday. This gives you perhaps a good illustration of how Chesterton sought to evangelize a culture through literature.
Can you talk about why he is so hard to read, for young people, to be attracted to him once again. It takes a bit of an effort to understand him, and yet he is so badly needed, his way of thinking, his way of reasoning, so what do you suggest for our generation?
I suggest that the best way to read Chesterton is to submerge yourself in Chesterton. The difficulty we have when we hear someone who is speaking with an English accent; you adjust your hearing, slightly, and then you catch on, and when you do, you find that Chesterton is deep, but he's funny. Chesterton believed that the deepest truths are told through jokes. Chesterton said, "The opposite of being funny is not being serious; the opposite of being funny is being not funny." That is, that you can be serious and humorous at the same time.
Left to right: George Bernard Shaw, Hillaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton is often called the apostle of common sense. Those who read him and see the truths behind his words -- well, what do they have to say?
"I think for me, there's not one specific point but I know that when I went to the university, my parents always encouraged me to seek books that were truthful, continuing to learn about the faith, and beauty, and all that kind of thing, I think I picked up a book of Chesterton at one point, and just started reading it and opening it up randomly, and I was just kind of blown away by what I was reading, it was ... he was putting things that I had learned about truth, about the faith, in words that I had never heard put before. And I was actually laughing out loud as I was reading it, To me it was quite unusual to read something that is so true and religious and yet makes you laugh at the same time.
"Other Christians love his writings just as well, and people that just love literature, but... what was it about him? He was a happy man; that is a counter-cultural thing, and he has this quote, I know this from Peter Kreeft, from some of his talks, and one of the things Peter Kreeft quotes a lot about Chesterton is that he said: "Paganism was a big thing; Christianity was bigger, and everything since has been comparatively small."
The Greek world had some good, noble things about it, and Christianity was sort of the definitive thing, and what's come since is this modern dullness, and what Chesterton talked about a lot is that people return to hedonism, you know, that kind of paganism, that is supposed to satisfy everything, and life is actually boring.
So people these days are often bored and not happy, and Chesterton was happy and was delighted with simple things; very simple things."
He wrote an entire essay, named "A Piece of Chalk," in 2,000 words. I just couldn't imagine you could write something as captivating with such wisdom at the same time that he weaves into the whole thing, about a piece of chalk, and I think towards the end he says something along the lines of "I would have written more, about all the other things you find in your pocket, such as the pocket knife, but the time of great epics is passed." The pocket knife could be an epic experience. A piece of chalk was an epic thing, as big, if not bigger, than the grandest of mountains.
When you read his writings, you get the sense of the wonder of a child, almost of the mischieviousness of a child, and at the same time, I think he was given a great gift of wisdom, like the wisdom of Solomon, I think, among the greatest philosophers and theologians that the world has ever known.
Well, why is he not popular, if he has such a response to all these things?
"I think, from my standpoint, there are two reasons. One is that we live in a world that has become very, very specialized. Most people do not understand the concept of a broad, liberal arts education. You go to school and you study your specific trade or specialization, you become an expert in that, so the world has become very compartmentalized. Chesterton was never compartmentalized; he wrote about everything.
Because of that, our modern world does not know what to do with him. And he wrote so much; just an absolute prolific writer. I think the other thing is that he argued against materialism, he argued against consumerism, he argued against so many things that are happening to the family, he argued against atheism, and he argued so well that our modern world, quite frankly, does not have the tools and is incapable of challenging him, because to argue with Chesterton is to lose.
So our modern world does not like to lose, when it comes to these supposed advances in every sphere of life. And Chesterton puts the brakes on. We need a perspective here, an eternal perspective, and we need to see the truth. I don't think our modern world can handle that, and they don't know what to do with him, because he put everything so well.
Orthodoxy PDF format.
Excerpt from "Orthodoxy"
Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters.
Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation. We have all heard people cite the celebrated line of Dryden as "Great genius is to madness near allied." But Dryden did not say that great genius was to madness near allied. Dryden was a great genius himself, and knew better. It would have been hard to find a man more romantic than he, or more sensible. What Dryden said was this, "Great wits are oft to madness near allied"; and that is true. It is the pure promptitude of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown. Also people might remember of what sort of man Dryden was talking. He was not talking of any unworldly visionary like Vaughan or George Herbert. He was talking of a cynical man of the world, a sceptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician. Such men are indeed to madness near allied. Their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade. It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. A flippant person has asked why we say, "As mad as a hatter." A more flippant person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.
And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners. When I was engaged in a controversy with the CLARION on the matter of free will, that able writer Mr. R.B.Suthers said that free will was lunacy, because it meant causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic would be causeless. I do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man. But my purpose is to point out something more practical. It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about free will. But it was certainly remarkable that a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about lunatics. Mr. Suthers evidently did not know anything about lunatics. The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions
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The Everlasting Man PDF. 1925. By G.K. Chesterton. Written as a rebuttal to "An Outline of History," by H.G. Wells.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton Website: Leicester, England. --- G.K. Chesterton • G.K. Chesterton: Poems on Wine (9 Poems)
G.K. Chesterton: Poems
• Poems: Download PDF
Cheese. Essay, published in 1910
Conclusion
The Summary Of This Book (The Everlasting Man) 1925
I have taken the liberty once or twice of borrowing the excellent phrase about
an Outline of History; though this study of a special truth and a special error
can of course claim no sort of comparison with the rich and many-sided
encyclopedia of history, for which that name was chosen. And yet there is a
certain reason in the reference: and a sense in which the one thing touches and
even cuts across the other. For the story of the world as told by Mr. Wells
could here only be criticised as an outline. And, strangely enough, it seems to
me that it is only wrong as an outline. It is admirable as an accumulation of
history; it is splendid as a store-house or treasure of history; it is a fascinating
disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of history; but
it is quite false as an outline of history. The one thing that seems to me quite
wrong about it is the outline; the sort of outline that can really be a single line,
like that which makes all the difference between a caricature of the profile of
Mr. Winston Churchill and of Sir Alfred Mond. In simple and homely
language, I mean the things that stick out; the things that make the simplicity
of a silhouette. I think the proportions are wrong; the proportions of what is
certain as compared with what is uncertain, of what played a great part as
compared with what played a smaller part, of what is ordinary and what is
extraordinary, of what really lies level with an average and what stands out as
an exception.
I do not say it as a small criticism of a great writer, and I have no reason to do
so; for in my own much smaller task I feel I have failed in very much the same
way. I am very doubtful whether I have conveyed to the reader the main point
I meant about the proportions of history, and why I have dwelt so much more
on some things than others. I doubt whether I have clearly fulfilled the plan
that I set out in the introductory chapter; and for that reason I add these lines as
a sort of summary in a concluding chapter. I do believe that the things on
which I have insisted are more essential to an outline of history than the things
which I have subordinated or dismissed. I do not believe that the past is most
truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely fades away into nature, or
civilisation merely fades away into barbarism, or religion fades away into
mythology, or our own religion fades away into the religions of the world. In
short I do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to
rub out the lines. I believe that, of the two, it would be far nearer the truth to
tell the tale very simply, like a primitive myth about a man who made the sun
and stars or a god who entered the body of a sacred monkey. I will therefore
sum up all that has gone before in what seems to me a realistic and reasonably
proportioned statement; the short story of mankind.
In the land lit by that neighbouring star, whose blaze is the broad daylight,
there are many and very various things motionless and moving. There moves
among them a race that is in its relation to others a race of gods. The fact is not
lessened but emphasised because it can behave like a race of demons. Its
distinction is not an individual illusion, like one bird pluming itself on its own
plumes; it is a solid and a many-sided thing. It is demonstrated in the very
speculations that have led to its being denied. That men, the gods of this lower
world, are linked with it in various ways is true; but it is another aspect of the
same truth. That they grow as the grass grows and walk as the beasts walk is a
secondary necessity that sharpens the primary distinction. It is like saying that
a magician must after all have the appearance of a man; or that even the fairies
could not dance without feet. It has lately been the fashion to focus the mind
entirely on these mild and subordinate resemblances and to forget the main
fact altogether. It is customary to insist that man resembles the other creatures.
Yes; and that very resemblance he alone can see. The fish does not trace the
fish-bone pattern in the fowls of the air; or the elephant and the emu compare
skeletons. Even in the sense in which man is at one with the universe it is an
utterly lonely universality. The very sense that he is united with all things is
enough to sunder him from all.
Looking around him by this unique light, as lonely as the literal flame that he
alone has kindled, this demigod or demon of the visible world makes that
world visible. He sees around him a world of a certain style or type. It seems
to proceed by certain rules or at least repetitions. He sees a green architecture
that builds itself without visible hands; but which builds itself into a very exact
plan or pattern, like a design already drawn in the air by an invisible finger. It
is not, as is now vaguely suggested, a vague thing. It is not a growth or a
groping of blind life. Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end, even for
every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common field.
In the very shape of things there is more than green growth; there is the
finality of the flower. It is a world of crowns. This impression, whether or no it
be an illusion, has so profoundly influenced this race of thinkers and masters
of the material world, that the vast majority have been moved to take a certain
view of that world. They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world
had a plan as the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the
flower. But so long as the race of thinkers was able to think, it was obvious
that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another thought more
thrilling and even terrible. There was someone else, some strange and unseen
being, who had designed these things, if indeed they were designed. There was
a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious benefactor who had been before
them and built up the woods and hills for their coming, and had kindled the
sunrise against their rising, as a servant kindles a fire. Now this idea of a mind
that gives a meaning to the universe has received more and more confirmation
within the minds of men, by meditations and experiences much more subtle
and searching than any such argument about the external plan of the world.
But I am concerned here with keeping the story in its most simple and even
concrete terms; and it is enough to say here that most men, including the
wisest men, have come to the conclusion that the world has such a final
purpose and therefore such a first cause. But most men in some sense
separated themselves from the wisest men, when it came to the treatment of
that idea. There came into existence two ways of treating that idea, which
between them made up most of the religious history of the world. The
majority, like the minority, had this strong sense of a second meaning in
things; of a strange master who knew the secret of the world. But the majority,
the mob or mass of men, naturally tended to treat it rather in the spirit of
gossip. The gossip, like all gossip, contained a great deal of truth and
falsehood. The world began to tell itself tales about the unknown being or his
sons or servants or messengers. Some of the tales may truly be called old
wives' tales; as professing only to be very remote memories of the morning of
the world; myths about the baby moon or the half-baked mountains. Some of
them might more truly be called travellers' tales; as being curious but
contemporary tales brought from certain borderlands of experience; such as
miraculous cures or those that bring whispers of what has happened to the
dead. Many of them are probably true tales; enough of them are probably true
to keep a person of real commonsense more or less conscious that there really
is something rather marvellous behind the cosmic curtain. But in a sense it is
only going by appearances; even if the appearances are called apparitions. It is
a matter of appearances--and disappearances. At the most these gods are
ghosts; that is, they are glimpses. For most of us they are rather gossip about
glimpses. And for the rest, the whole world is full of rumours, most of which
are almost avowedly romances. The great majority of the tales about gods and
ghosts and the invisible king are told, if not for the sake of the tale, at least for
the sake of the topic. They are evidence of the eternal interest of the theme;
they are not evidence of anything else, and they are not meant to be. They are
mythology or the poetry that is not bound in books-- or bound in any other
way.
Meanwhile the minority, the sages or thinkers, had withdrawn apart and had
taken up an equally congenial trade. They were drawing up plans of the world;
of the world which all believed to have a plan. They were trying to set forth
the plan seriously and to scale. They were setting their minds directly to the
mind that had made the mysterious world; considering what sort of a mind it
might be and what its ultimate purpose might be. Some of them made that
mind much more impersonal than mankind has generally made it; some
simplified it almost to a blank; a few, a very few, doubted it altogether. One or
two of the more morbid fancied that it might be evil and an enemy; just one or
two of the more degraded in the other class worshipped demons instead of
gods. But most of these theorists were theists: and they not only saw a moral
plan in nature, but they generally laid down a moral plan for humanity. Most
of them were good men who did good work: and they were remembered and
reverenced in various ways. They were scribes; any their scriptures became
more or less holy scriptures. They were law-givers; and their tradition became
not only legal but ceremonial. We may say that they received divine honours,
in the sense in which kings and great captains in certain countries often
received divine honours. In a word, wherever the other popular spirit, the spirit
of legend and gossip could come into play, it surrounded them with the more
mystical atmosphere of the myths. Popular poetry turned the sages into saints.
But that was all it did. They remained themselves; men never really forgot that
they were men, only made into gods in the sense that they were made into
heroes. Divine Plato, like Divus Caesar, was a title and not a dogma. In Asia,
where the atmosphere was more mythological, the man was made to look
more like a myth, but he remained a man. He remained a man of a certain
social class or school of men, receiving and deserving great honour from
mankind. It is the order or school of the philosophers; the men who have set
themselves seriously to trace the order across any apparent chaos in the vision
of life. Instead of living on imaginative rumours and remote traditions and the
tail-end of exceptional experiences about the mind and meaning behind the
world, they have tried in a sense to project the primary purpose of that mind a
priori. They have tried to put on paper a possible plan of the world; almost as
if the world were not yet made.
Right in the middle of all these things stands up an enormous exception. It is
quite unlike anything else. It is a thing final like the trump of doom, though it
is also a piece of good news; or news that seems too good to be true. It is
nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has
visited his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in
the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original
invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists
hand down myths; the Man Who Made the World. That such a higher
personality exists behind all things had indeed always been implied by all the
best thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends. But nothing of this
sort had ever been implied in any of them. It is simply false to say that the
other sages and heroes had claimed to be that mysterious master and maker, of
whom the world had dreamed and disputed. Not one of them had ever claimed
to be anything of the sort. Not one of their sects or schools had even claimed
that they had claimed to be anything of the sort. The most that any religious
prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being. The most
that any visionary had ever said was that men might catch glimpses of the
glory of that spiritual being; or much more often of lesser spiritual beings. The
most that any primitive myth had even suggested was that the Creator was
present at the Creation. But that the Creator was present at scenes a little
subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax-collectors and
government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that
this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilisation
for more than a thousand years-- that is something utterly unlike anything else
in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he
spoke his first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog. Its unique
character can be used as an argument against it as well as for it. It would be
easy to concentrate on it as a case of isolated insanity; but it makes nothing but
dust and nonsense of comparative religion.
It came on the world with a wind and rush of running messengers proclaiming
that apocalyptic portent, and it is not unduly fanciful to say that they are
running still. What puzzles the world, and its wise philosophers and fanciful
pagan poets, about the priests and people of the Catholic Church is that they
still behave as if they were messengers. A messenger does not dream about
what his message might be, or argue about what it probably would be; he
delivers it as it is. It is not a theory or a fancy but a fact. It is not relevant to
this intentionally rudimentary outline to prove in detail that it is a fact; but
merely to point out that these messengers do deal with it as men deal with a
fact. All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, authority, and dogmatism and
the refusal to retract and modify, are but the natural human attributes of a man
with a message relating to a fact. I desire to avoid in this last summary all the
controversial complexities that may once more cloud the simple lines of that
strange story; which I have already called, in words that are much too weak,
the strangest story in the world. I desire merely to mark those main lines and
specially to mark where the great line is really to be drawn. The religion of the
world, in its right proportions, is not divided into fine shades of mysticism or
more or less rational forms of mythology. It is divided by the line between the
men who are bringing that message and the men who have not yet heard it, or
cannot yet believe it.
But when we translate the terms of that strange tale back into the more
concrete and complicated terminology of our time, we find it covered by
names and memories of which the very familiarity is a falsification. For
instance, when we say that a country contains so many Moslems, we really
mean that it contains so many monotheists; and we really mean, by that, that it
contains so many men; men with the old average assumption of men--that the
invisible ruler remains invisible. They hold it along with the customs of a
certain culture and under the simpler laws of a certain law-giver; but so they
would if their law-giver were Lycurgus or Solon. They testify to something
which is a necessary and noble truth; but was never a new truth. Their creed is
not a new colour; it is the neutral and normal tint that is the background of the
many-coloured life of man. Mahomet did not, like the Magi, find a new star;
he saw through his own particular window a glimpse of the great grey field of
the ancient starlight. So when we say that the country contains so many
Confucians or Buddhists, we mean it contains so many pagans whose prophets
have given them another and rather vaguer version of the invisible power;
making it not only invisible but almost impersonal. When we say that they also
have temples and idols and priests and periodical festivals, we simply mean
that this sort of heathen is enough of a human being to admit the popular
element of pomp and pictures and feasts and fairy-tales. We only mean that
Pagans have more sense than Puritans. But what the gods are supposed to be,
what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what
those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those
messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple
reason that nobody else has any news.
Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as
if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum
of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In
the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those
headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a selfsacrifice
that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not
pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is
newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on
the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow
more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might
sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.
For this is the last proof of the miracle; that something so supernatural should
have become so natural. I mean that anything so unique when seen from the
outside should only seem universal when seen from the inside. I have not
minimised the scale of the miracle, as some of our wilder theologians think it
wise to do. Rather have I deliberately dwelt on that incredible interruption, as
a blow that broke the very backbone of history. I have great sympathy with the
monotheists, the Moslems, or the Jews, to whom it seems a blasphemy; a
blasphemy that might shake the world. But it did not shake the world; it
steadied the world. That fact, the more we consider it, will seem more solid
and more strange. I think it a piece of plain justice to all the unbelievers to
insist upon the audacity of the act of faith that is demanded of them. I willingly
and warmly agree that it is, in itself, a suggestion at which we might expect
even the brain of the believer to reel, when he realised his own belief. But the
brain of the believer does not reel; it is the brains of the unbelievers that reel.
We can see their brains reeling on every side and into every extravagance of
ethics and psychology; into pessimism and the denial of life; into pragmatism
and the denial of logic; seeking their omens in nightmares and their canons in
contradictions; shrieking for fear at the far-off sight of things beyond good and
evil, or whispering of strange stars where two and two make five. Meanwhile
this solitary thing that seems at first so outrageous in outline remains solid and
sane in substance. It remains the moderator of all these manias; rescuing
reason from the Pragmatists exactly as it rescued laughter from the Puritans. I
repeat that I have deliberately emphasised its intrinsically defiant and
dogmatic character. The mystery is how anything so startling should have
remained defiant and dogmatic and yet become perfectly normal and natural. I
have admitted freely that, considering the incident in itself, a man who says he
is God may be classed with a man who says he is glass. But the man who says
he is glass is not a glazier making windows for all the world. He does not
remain for after ages as a shining and crystalline figure, in whose light
everything is as clear as crystal.
But this madness has remained sane. The madness has remained sane when
everything else went mad. The madhouse has been a house to which, age after
age, men are continually coming back as to a home. That is the riddle that
remains; that anything so abrupt and abnormal should still be found a habitable
and hospitable thing. I care not if the sceptic says it is a tall story; I cannot see
how so toppling a tower could stand so long without foundation. Still less can
I see how it could become, as it has become, the home of man. Had it merely
appeared and disappeared, it might possibly have been remembered or
explained as the last leap of the rage of illusion, the ultimate myth of the
ultimate mood, in which the mind struck the sky and broke. But the mind did
not break. It is the one mind that remains unbroken in the break-up of the
world. If it were an error, it seems as if the error could hardly have lasted a
day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an ecstasy could not
endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two thousand years; and the
world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in its
hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of
fate and death, than all the world outside. For it was the soul of Christendom
that came forth from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common
sense. Though we dared not look on His face we could look on His fruits; and
by His fruits we should know Him. The fruits are solid and the fruitfulness is
much more than a metaphor; and nowhere in this sad world are boys happier in
apple-trees, or men in more equal chorus singing as they tread the vine, than
under the fixed flash of this instant and intolerant enlightenment; the lightning
made eternal as the light.
(End of book)
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
"That they all may be one." -- John 17:21
The Catholic Faith is the Faith of the Scriptures The Song of Right and Wrong
Feast on wine or fast on water Tea is like the East he grows in, Tea, although an Oriental, As for all the windy waters, * * * * * * *
G.K. Chesterton Quotations
More Chesterton Quotations
NEVER in the history of Western civilization, have Christians of all backgrounds faced such persecution for trying to help people see the humanity of the unborn, honouring the sanctity of marriage, and attempting to protect youth from the media's normalization of sex, drugs, and violence. We fear the worst is to come. Christians have got to cooperate like never before, and it will be easier if we understand each other.
Here we lay Catholicism at the feet of our Evangelical friends. We are not trying to gloss over differences, but our hope is that all Christians will love one another, as He has loved us (Jn 13:34). We are not apologists. We are simply a Catholic couple responding to Jesus' prayer "that they may all be one, as you Father, are in me and I am in you." (Jn 17:21) "Let us not give up meeting together... let us encourage one another." (Heb 10:25), "Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them." (Mat 18:20).
"I have a dream: when we let freedom ring, all of God's children, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands." (Martin Luther King, "I have a dream," Washington D.C., Aug. 28, 1963)
by David J. Webster, former Baptist Pastor
And your honour shall stand sure,
God Almighty's son and daughter
He the valiant, she the pure;
If an angel out of heaven
Brings you other things to drink,
Thank him for his kind attentions,
Go and pour them down the sink.
A great yellow Mandarin
With urbanity of manner
And unconsciousness of sin;
All the women, like a harem,
At his pig-tail troop along;
And, like all the East he grows in,
He is Poison when he's strong.
Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast,
Cocoa is a dull, disloyal,
Lying, crawling cad and clown,
And may very well be grateful
To the fool that takes him down.
They were rained like tempests down
When good drink had been dishonoured
By the tipplers of the town;
When red wine had brought red ruin
And the death-dance of our times,
Heaven sent us Soda Water
As a torment for our crimes.
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