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.”
6 Comments
Amy @ Hope Is the Word
Thanks for sharing this, Janet. How encouraging! It almost makes me think I’m capable of tackling Chesterton’s nonfiction. I read Man Who Was Tuesday and it was entertaining but inscrutable.
GretchenJoanna
Janet, Firstly I have to thank you generally for all your reviews. I always appreciate your thoughtful questions and comments. And it’s a joy to read anyone else’s discussion of Chesterton’s writings. I also usually feel inadequate for his books, but that seems to be the kind of relationship I prefer with my favorite authors; I want someone who can stretch and inspire me.
Recently I read on a blog a quote from Chesterton – I think it was Chesterton – something about Christians being like children playing on a cliff, and now that I want to think more about it I find that I didn’t bookmark it. Was that on your blog? I can’t find any such quote on Google.
Janet
Thank you! The feeling is mutual.
Unfortunately I’m not the source of the Chesterton quote you mention. Hope you find it!
Dennis King
Here is a link to the Chesterton quote about children playing at the top of a cliff. The quote is in the seventh paragraph down and comes from “Orthodoxy.”
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JrUoq3ge2QoJ:www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/print.php%3Fstoryid%3D9528+chesterton+christians+like+children+playing+on+cliff&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
GretchenJoanna
Thanks very much, Dennis! And Janet, for giving me the heads-up. Seems this was a likely place to post my query. :-)
Amy @ Hope Is the Word
I just ordered Orthodoxy. Man Who Was Tuesday completely bumfuzzled me (but I enjoyed it!), so I thought I’d give him another go, this time with nonfiction. We shall see what I make of it (or what it makes of me, perhaps?).