"I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to Heaven, he proves that he cannot go to Hartle-pool. I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. I have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgement, by showing that there can be no human judgement, even for practical purposes. ...
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon someone who never lived at all.
"And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. ...
"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."
- G K Chesterton, The Romance of Orthodoxy, in Orthodoxy.
1 comment:
my goodness me, how prophetic.
this is why you can diagnose a theology by what it does or says of man & his world...whence Schaeffer's liveability or Lewis' "as the Sun has risen - not only do I see it, but by it, I see everything else"
Since man really is made in the image of God, once you change who/what God is, who man is is up for grabs. Like Viktor Frankl put it, if we present man with a concept of himself that is not true, we may well corrupt him"
could this help on the question of why Chesterton's always looking at humanitarian concerns?
Thanks!
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