Christianity,  Nonfiction

Encouragement from Chesterton

As I look at the world, I worry. Earthquakes. Floods. Unrest sweeping the Middle East. “Wars and rumors of wars.” Decadence. The church, deeply influenced by surrounding culture. America so deeply in debt it seems only a matter of time before we implode entirely. Democratic ideals subordinated to increasingly centralized power.

The Proverbs 31 woman “smiles at the future.” I am one in a long line of mothers who find this is not our natural reflex, who wonder and worry about the world our children will inherit.

One of the great blessings of reading The Everlasting Man is the way G.K. Chesterton encourages us to take a step back and survey the sweep of history. There we see that civilizations have risen and fallen. Political power, cultural sophistication, ideological fashions have risen and fallen. Even Christianity has risen and fallen. But it has survived its own death time after time. The world has never yet been forsaken; God has held true to his promise to Noah.

Chesterton regards Jesus’ first miracle in the gospels, the changing of water to wine, as a metaphor for the way God always works. “You have saved the best wine for the end,” the people marvel at the wedding in Cana. In the same way God, just when we think our faith may not be equal to the times, breaks out the very best wine, the wine of resurrection and revival:

Again and again, before our time, men have grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original wine…

This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all. The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age. It has not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the sense of coming to a natural and necessary end…

Feudalism had passed away, and the words did not pass away. The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore out gradually in its turn: and here at least it was thought that the words would die. They went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all its light and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints. It was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future. To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we watch, it grows.

If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for so simple a thing as its death. They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”

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