Orthodoxy

by G.K. Chesterton

The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.

If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is...

Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich,

to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor.

But no Christianity, not even the most ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a baronet was better than a butcher in that sacred sense.

No Christianity, however ignorant or extravagant, ever suggested that a duke would not be damned.

All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. “You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there.”

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.

The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.

But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially ruinous and confusing.

The thing is a mere accident of words. In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on.

And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. Nay, indeed almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of this chapter to show.

it never means a man who wishes to increase that number. It always means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came out of His grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came out of her grave.

It is exactly in their souls that they are divided.

All humanity does agree that we are in a net of sin. Most of humanity agrees that there is some way out. But as to what is the way out, I do not think that there are two institutions in the universe which contradict each other so flatly as Buddhism and Christianity.

A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship.

This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the eyes of the mediaeval saint in the picture. This is the meaning of the sealed eyes of the superb Buddhist image. The Christian saint is happy because he has verily been cut off from the world; he is separate from things and is staring at them in astonishment. But why should the Buddhist saint be astonished at things?—since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can hardly be astonished at itself.

buddishm

For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea “it is not well for man to be alone.” The social instinct asserted itself everywhere as when the Eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled by the Western idea of monks.

He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.

If we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin.

If we want to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter.

what you can define as valuable, what you can comprehend, and leave all the rest, all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature incomprehensible?” This is the real question; this is the last question; and it is a pleasure to try to answer it.

The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist. I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.

The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind.

Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom;

second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom.

That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones

bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art.

No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm.

found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.

It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.

If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer...

It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer ...

The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

For our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome.

That is the weird inspiration of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about.

The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord.

The question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of common sense and of ordinary historical imagination:

I suggest the Regalvanisation. But the strongest of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of materialist dogmatism—I may say materialist mysticism.

The sceptic always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed.

When scientific evolution was announced, some feared that it would encourage mere animality. It did worse: it encouraged mere spirituality.

angel. But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil.

Benjamin Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of the angels. He was indeed; he was on t...

have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one.

For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex.

for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom.

But a man can expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land of authority.

One can find no meanings in a jungle of scepticism; but the man will find more and more meanings who walks through a forest of doctrine and design.