G.K.Chesterton Orthodoxy

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all that is called Christian, especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting. The
great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile. Bradlaugh in an expansive
way, Huxley, in a reticent way, were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem tenable
that there was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels. The Gospel
paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things
made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a
sheep. I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I should have gone on
believing it. But I read something very different. I turned the next page in my agnostic
manual, and my brain turned up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity
not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed, was the
mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly
angry with the Christian, because he never was angry. And now I was told to be angry
with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human
history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun. The very
people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the
monasteries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valour
of the Crusades. It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that
Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did. The Quakers
(we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and yet the massacres of
Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What
was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could
be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and
second because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this
monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a
queerer shape every instant.
I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one real objection
to the faith. The one real objection to the Christian religion is simply that it is one
religion. The world is a big place, full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it
may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in
Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed with this
argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the doctrine often preached in
Ethical Societies -- I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of all
humanity rounded on the omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said,
divided men; but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and
most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense. It might find
Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing Thou shalt not steal. It might
decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when
deciphered would be Little boys should tell the truth. I believed this doctrine of the
brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still -- with
other things. And I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I
supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice
and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said
that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that
morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in
another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our
brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But
if I mildly pointed out that one of men s universal customs was to have an altar, then my
agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in
darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was their daily taunt against
Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark.
But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress
were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their
chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there
seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things.
When considering some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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