Note: This post doesn't have anything to do with Mother's Day, at least not on purpose. Sorry.
If a shade arose from the under world, and stared at Piccadilly, that
shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary closed carriage. He would suppose that the coachman on the box was a triumphant conqueror,
dragging behind him a kicking and imprisoned captive. So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time, we may mistake who is uppermost.
I have now said enough to show (to any one to whom such an explanation is essential) that I have in the ordinary arena of apologetics, a ground of
belief. In pure records of experiment (if these be taken democratically without contempt or favour) there is evidence first, that miracles happen,
and second that the nobler miracles belong to our tradition. But I will not pretend that this curt discussion is my real reason for accepting
Christianity instead of taking the moral good of Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism. I 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. It not only
certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me tomorrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One
fine morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.
Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such
men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter
everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and
Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. There is one only other parallel to
this position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all began. When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or
that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best of out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining
coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say “My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep
delicate truths that flowers smell.” No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really
knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth tomorrow, as well as today.
Orthodoxy, 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.
License
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, May 08, 2016
Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, 69
Labels:
apologetics,
belief,
Chesterton,
discovery,
G. K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy,
the church,
truth
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