That sounds like a truism, but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth.” But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man. What for him would be the simplest lesson of that strange stone story book ? After all, it would come back to this: that he had dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer. “The more we look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.
When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right.” As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War-they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. It was the anticlerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. They will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan skeptics who are the chief enemies of the Church. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests, but it would be much truer of journalists. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward’s castle, though they do not call an editor’s office a coward’s castle. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons, as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plainclothes detectives. Thus they make current and anticlerical cant as a sort of small talk. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone, as of a random and illiterate heckling. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. “The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it.
Though Chesterton writes as a committed Roman Catholic,* his critiques of modern thought are incisive and worth reading. But Chesterton’s mind is sharp and he is quick to point out fallacies and inconsistencies in unbelieving thought. The book is not academic or annotated, and Chesterton grants this weakness. This is a witty apologetic that advocates original monotheism, as opposed to an evolutionary account of religion, and the supernatural origins and distinct status of Christianity, as opposed to a higher critical and comparative religions approach.
0 kommentar(er)
