This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities of life.
This is knowing that a man’s heart is to the left and not in the middle. This is knowing not only that the earth is round, but knowing exactly
where it is flat. Christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate
Christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful
and also severe—that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one. Any
one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one may be quite miserable without making it
impossible to be quite happy—that was a discovery in psychology.
Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I
mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an
inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great
and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was
no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them
strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was
a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfillment of
prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious.
Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here. Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.
Musings on science, the Bible, and fantastic literature (and sometimes basketball and other stuff).
God speaks to us through the Bible and the findings of science, and we should listen to both types of revelation.
The title is from Psalm 84:11.
The Wikipedia is usually a pretty good reference. I mostly use the World English Bible (WEB), because it is public domain. I am grateful.
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I have written an e-book, Does the Bible Really Say That?, which is free to anyone. To download that book, in several formats, go here.
The posts in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can copy and use this material, as long as you aren't making money from it. If you give me credit, thanks. If not, OK.
The posts in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can copy and use this material, as long as you aren't making money from it. If you give me credit, thanks. If not, OK.
Sunday, August 02, 2015
Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 34
Labels:
Catholic church,
Chesterton,
doctrine,
G. K. Chesterton,
ideas
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KUl page
Thanks, I think. I don't know what that means.
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