Everyday in Grace

He is Risen!

2011-04-20T19:34:00.003+02:00

1. When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My riches gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

2. Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my Lord;
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

3. See, from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down;
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

4. Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Mówienie w co wierzysz jest bardziej zrozumiałe, niż powiedzieć "kalwinista"

2011-03-22T11:40:00.001+01:00

Jesteśmy chrześcijanami. Radykalnymi, pełnokrwistymi, nasyconymi Biblią, wywyższającymi Chrystusa, skupionymi na Bogu, działającymi misyjnie, zdobywającymi dusze, kochającymi kościół, szukającymi świętości, ceniącymi Bożą suwerenność, ogłupiałymi na punkcie łaski, ze złamanymi sercami, szczęśliwymi naśladowcami wszechmocnego, ukrzyżowanego Chrystusa. Takimi przynajmniej staramy się być.

Innymi słowy, jesteśmy kalwinistami. Ale używanie teologicznej łatki, nie jest tak przydatne jak mówienie ludziom w co wierzysz. Więc zapomnij o łatce, i powiedz im jasno bez wykrętów i niejasności w co wierzysz o zbawieniu.

Jeśli spytają, "Jesteś kalwinistą?" odpowiedz, "Sam zdecyduj. Oto w co wierzę..."

Wierzę że jestem tak duchowo zepsuty, dumny i buntowniczy że sam nigdy nie doszedłbym do wiary w Jezusa bez Bożego miłosierdzia, suwerennie zwyciężającego ostatnie bastiony mojego buntu. (1 Koryntian 2:14; Efezjan 2:1-4; Rzymian 8:7)

Wierzę że Bóg wybrał mnie bym był jego dzieckiem przed założeniem świata, na podstawie niczego co jest we mnie, wcześniej znanego lub inaczej. (Efezjan 1:4-6; Dzieje 13:48; Rzymian 8:29-30; 11:5-7)

Wierzę że Chrystus umarł w zastępstwie grzeszników dając prawdziwą ofertę zbawienia dla wszystkich ludzi, i że miał w swojej śmierci plan by nabyć swoją wybrankę, a dokładniej, zebrać wszystkich wierzących, których imiona są od wieczności zapisane w księdze życia należącej do Baranka który został zabity. (Jan 3:16; Jan 10;15; Efezjan 5:25; Objawienia 13:8)

Gdy byłem martwy w swoich grzechach i ślepy na piękno Chrystusa, Bóg mnie ożywił, otworzył oczy mojego serca, dał mi możliwość uwierzyć, zjednoczył mnie z Jezusem, wraz ze wszystkimi korzyściami przebaczenia, usprawiedliwienia i wiecznego życia. (Efezjan 2:4-5; 2 Koryntian 4:6; Filipian 2:29; Efezjan 2:8-9; Dzieje 16:14; Efezjan 1:7; Filipian 3:9)

Jestem wiecznie bezpieczny nie z powodu czegokolwiek co zrobiłem w przeszłości, ale ponieważ Bóg jest zdecydowany i wierny by dokończyć dzieło jakie zaczął - utrzymać moją wiarę, zachować mnie od apostazji, i powstrzymać mnie od grzechu który prowadzi do śmierci. (1 Koryntian 1:8-9; 1 Tesaloniczan 5:23-24; Filipian 1:6; 1 Piotra 1:5; Judy 1:25; Jana 10:28-29; 1 Jana 5:16)

Nazywaj to jak chcesz, to jest moje życie. Wierzę w to ponieważ widzę to w Biblii. I ponieważ tego doświadczyłem. Niech na wieki będzie chwalona wielkość Bożej łaski!

Marcus Birro: Att älska är svårt

2011-02-22T17:54:00.000+01:00

"Det finns inget rent kvar",sjunger Thåström i Imperiet från 1985.
Det är knappast renare nu. Det mesta är en sorts sugande gyttja av futtigheter. Ingenting får vara heligt längre. Allt ska släpas i smutsen. Det uppfattas som progressivt och radikalt att omänskliggöra grundläggande värderingar som livets okränkbara värde, Gud, kärlek och sexualitet.
Allting säljs till lågt pris. Vi tror oss göra en god affär när vi skänker bort våra kroppar, vår tro och vår värdighet. Vilket misstag det är.

Vår samtid är en kran som vi öppnar och glömmer bort. Allt av värde rinner ur oss.
Gud är det särskilt populärt att håna. Till och med i kyrkan. Vilken obarmhärtig skam att Svenska Kyrkan, med ett darrande leende får man förmoda, öppnar sina dörrar för befängda konstnärers fixering vid nedmonterandet av allt heligt.
Jesus blir bög i läderbyxor och alla stumma ateister nickar med i samförstånd. När en annan konstnär gör rondellhundar av profeten Mohammed förvånas vi över de troendes indignation och förtvivlan. Konstnären lyfts in i värmen och prisas för sin medelmåttighet.
Som om dessa ständiga attacker på troende skulle vara modigt. Som om uppluckrandet av tro, helighet och tröst, skulle vara en ärbar bedrift. Vilket misstag det är.
Det är bara lathet. Det är futtigt och ovärdigt. Alla kan hata, det är enkelt. Att älska är tusen gånger svårare.

Det är varken progressivt eller beundransvärt att spotta på folks tro. Det är billigt och enkelt. Det är att dundra in med en bulldozer i ett hav av öppna dörrar.
Människor som lever sina liv utan något heligt missar flera dimensioner av tillvaron. Det är en helt och hållet magisk värld där döden inte är det slutgiltiga mörkret, där trygghet är på riktigt, där samtalet med Gud är en kärleksrelation genom livet, där trösten finns bara en liten bit bort, precis där ljuset bryts.
Människor utan känsla för helighet kommer en dag upptäcka att livet planas ut, att tillvaron går ner för landning på en enda grå åker av värkande vardag. Det finns mysterium som inte går att lösa, men som lättar på förlåten och skänker dig lugna drömmar alla stormiga nätter.

Det finns en saga som väntar på att bli läst, men slarvar man bort sitt liv på världsliga ting, på fyllor, plast och cynism, så missar man den där sagan. Mysteriet förblir olöst. Sagan blir aldrig läst.
Utan helighet kommer dina tårar aldrig sluta rinna. Om du envisas med att trampa på allt heligt, och blundar för miraklet, kommer du aldrig hitta källan till de där tårarna. Din kran kommer stå öppen tills allt ditt ljus har runnit ut och du sitter ensam, yr och full av mörker och vind.
När du hånskrattar åt min tro eller min svaghet är jag inte längre där. Jag är där trösten är.

Livet har ett okränkbart värde, långt bortanför allt politiskt korrekt och slentrianmässiga konstruktion. Ni kan håna tills all luft runnit ur er. Ni kan förstöra med all er kraft. För vi andra är inte ens där längre. Vi andra har rört oss bort från det som drar ner och utplånar oss.
Tidens nycker, människors längtan att splittra och söndra, våra naiva försök att slå oss ut ur en andlig ordning, är korta sekunder av tillfälliga segrar. Hatet är hårt, smärtsamt men kort. Kärleken har ett långt minne och du ryms i detta minne, du också.
Mysteriet står kvar, även om du inte bryr dig om att lösa det.

Av Marcus Birro
marcus.birro@expressen.se

Humanists believe...

2010-10-10T13:13:00.001+02:00

We believe in Marx Freud and Darwin. We believe everything is OK as long as you don't hurt anyone- to best of your definition of hurt and to the best of your definition of knowledge. We believe in sex before, during, and after marriage. We believe in the therapy of sin. We believe that adultery is fun. We believe taboos are taboo. We believe that everything is getting better despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence must be investigated and you can prove anything with evidence. We believe there is something in horoscopes, UFOs, and bent spoons. Jesus was a good man just like Buddha, Mohammed, and ourselves. He was a good moral teacher although we think some of his good morals were really bad.

We believe that all religions are basically the same (at least the ones that we read were.) They all believe in love and goodness they only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, god, and salvation.

We believe that after death comes the nothing because when you ask the dead what happens they say nothing. If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then it is compulsory heaven for all excepting perhaps Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan. We believe in Masters and Johnson, what's selected as average, what's average is normal, what's normal is good. We believe in total disarmament because we believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed. Americans should beat their guns in to tractors and the Russians would be sure to follow. We believe that man is essentially good its only his behavior that lets him down. This is the fault of society, society is the fault of conditions, and conditions are the fault of society. We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him and reality will adapt accordingly- the universe will readjust history will alter. We believe that there is no absolute truth excepting the truth that there is no absolute truth. We believe in the rejection of creeds and the flowering of individual thought.

If chance be the father of all flesh disaster is his rainbow in the sky, and when you hear state of emergency, sniper kills 10, troops on rampage, youths go looting, bomb blasts school it is but the sound of man worshipping his maker.

Repent for Your Environmental Sins!

2010-10-10T11:50:00.001+02:00

Environmentalism replaces the individual transcendence of death found in conventional spiritual religions, with a materialistic creed of subsumption within a biological metaphor. Immortality is not achieved through a community of faith, but an ecosystem. Gaia replaces God as the source of all life, the central relationship for man and the keystone of his morality. Eco-morality replaces human-centered morality. People become just another species in a vast collection of them, no more worthy of respect or protection, than the badger or the snake. Less worthy even, because humanity has overstepped its bounds, through the "original sin" of fire, capitalism and innovation. This time around the "apple" is actually a diesel fueled engine and if we smash enough of them, the spirits of the earth will let us back into the garden where we can all go around naked, live in caves and die at the ripe old age of thirty.

It's insane, yes. But it's also a belief system, one that has given rise to a post-human left, which is far less concerned with the question of human rights, and much more concerned with managing humanity, as if it were an invading pathogen. Environmentalism provides moral cover for the left's disengagement from the issues of human rights that it once pretended to care about. Its coldness toward human beings is a sign of how much it "cares" about something bigger than man. About the whole planet. Suddenly environmentalists aren't sociopaths, even when they make videos featuring the murder of children who don't go along with their creed, they just happen to be supremely caring people who are operating on a level beyond that of mortal men. Their cruelty is actually a higher form of morality.

What is the Gospel?

2010-10-09T11:13:00.001+02:00

What is the Gospel?
How do you become a Christian?

There is Something to Admit

First of all we have to admit that we are all sinners. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Romans 3:23

Each of us has failed miserably when it comes to keeping His commandments. We haven't honored our parents as we should, we have tolerated untruthfulness, we have been envious of our neighbors and while we may not have actually committed murder, we have tolerated murderous thoughts. Our natural tendency is not to acknowledge our sin. We are prone to blame our circumstances or our genes. We are keen to gain comfort in the assurance that we are not as bad as some people.

So what brings us to the place where we know that we must admit we are sinners? This is something God does. Jesus explained to His disciples that He would send the Holy Spirit, "When He comes, He will convince the world of the meaning of sin, of true goodness and of judgment." John 16:8

There is Something to Believe

Jesus is the only Savior from the sin to which we have just admitted. We may have begun our journey fairly convinced Jesus was a "good man," but as we considered the evidence we were forced in a different direction. We certainly did not set out predisposed to believe. So we find ourselves agreeing with this statement: "Faith is forced consent. That is to say, when evidence is judged by the mind to be sufficient, the state of mind we call 'faith' is the inevitable effect….whenever the reasons are judged sufficient, faith or belief is induced." (John Murray "Collected Writings II" p237)

So we come to believe that God has made provision for our sin in the person of His Son. "We see real love, not in the fact that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to make personal atonement for our sins." 1 John 4:10 JBP.

There is Something to Consider

We need to come to terms with the cost of following Christ. He said,"If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, he must give up all right to himself, carry his cross every day and keep close behind me. For the man who wants to save his life will lose it, but the man who loses his life for my sake will save it." Luke 9:23,4.

Now be careful not to misunderstand this. The only thing we 'contribute' to our salvation is the sin from which we need to be saved. One way to learn the important distinction is to remember that while entrance to the Christian life is free, the annual subscription is everything we have!

There is a cost involved in saying no to sin.

Jesus said, "The time has come, the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!… Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

Notice that His first call is to 'repentance' This means to turn from sin to God. There are certain characteristics which Sinclair Ferguson points out are commonly present in repentance.

A sense of shame, such as when David cries to the Lord after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba. "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what it evil in your sight…" Psalm 51:3,4.
This leads to humbling. Instead of jumping to our defense or trying to blame our actions on people or circumstances, we acknowledge our accountability.
There is an accompanying sense of sorrow and regret. If we had been in the corner of the bedroom of the prodigal son on his first night at home, I think we would have heard the sobs and seen the tears and watched in wonder as he kneeled by his bed and mourned the wasted years and the squandered privileges. The memory of sin is distasteful to the truly penitent.
There is also a recognition of God's pardon. It is the kindness of God which leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4). While we are emphasizing the need for repentance at the gateway of faith, this is something which continues through our entire life.
There is a cost involved in saying no to self.

What we mean by this is simply that Christ comes first, before everything and everyone else. This has a peculiarly challenging ring in the midst of a culture that has gone to great lengths to bolster self-esteem and make much of the individual. It means that my time and my talents and my relationships and my career will all be brought under His jurisdiction.

There is a cost involved in saying no to secrecy.

When a man or woman discovers the freedom Jesus brings, they will be ready and willing to let others know. The Bible confirms this in a number of places. "If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved." Romans 10:9

While coming to trust in Christ is undoubtedly a personal matter, it is not private.

There is Something to Do

Genuine Christian faith is more than saying,"I believe Jesus is who He claimed to be." After all even demons are orthodox when it comes to this, but clearly they are not Christians! (James 2:19)

Faith means accepting the facts can be trusted, and acting upon what you believe to be true.

Alister McGrath uses an analogy which you may find helpful. Imagine I am suffering from blood poisoning and there is a bottle of penicillin sitting on my bedside table. What are my options?

I may accept that this bottle of penicillin exists.
I may trust that it is capable of curing my illness, but I shall never cure my blood poisoning, unless -
I act upon that trust and take the penicillin. Acceptance and trust prepare the way for the final component of faith - entering into the promise, and receiving what it offers.
Mere mental assent to these facts without any corresponding action no more brings us to personal faith than memorizing a menu allows us to enjoy a meal. True faith means moving beyond the awareness of the existence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to a living personal relationship with Him.

If God has shown you your need and given you this desire, then you must forsake everything and trust Christ NOW! There's a time coming when it will be too late.

So here is the most crucial question you will ever face: "Do you take this Savior?"

If your answer is "yes," then let me encourage you to deal with the matter immediately. You may want to find a quiet place to seal your commitment. God is not so concerned with your ability to articulate your thoughts as He is aware of the sincerity of the response of your heart. A simple prayer such as this may be of help to you in marking the moment. Depending on the kind of person you are, you may want to write this in your journal or the fly leaf of your Bible. This is a unique occasion.

"Lord Jesus Christ, I confess that I am a guilty, lost and helpless sinner. I want you to save me, to take your rightful place as Lord of my life. I want to turn from my sin and trust only in your atoning sacrifice. I give my life to you. Take charge of it all and help me by the power of the Holy Spirit to follow after you."

It is important for us to recognize the mystery which surrounds this. Jesus referred to this when he was talking with Nicodemus about being born again. He said, "The wind blows where it likes, you can hear the sound of it but you have no idea where it comes from and where it goes. Nor can you tell how a man is born by the wind of the Spirit." John3:8 JBP.

This recognizes the amazing wonder of God's grace whereby Jesus comes to where I am, calls me by my name and changes me. So this life-changing encounter takes place both mysteriously and individually.

Faith is the gift of God, and we may be confident that having given it, He will not take it back. Allow me to offer you the same encouragement Paul gave to the believers in Philippi, "I am confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ." Phil.1:6

So What Should I DO Now

There are two very important things you should now do.

Get yourself a Bible and start reading it. The gospel of John is a good place to start. The Bible is the Word of God and He gave it to us that we might learn more about following Him. Set aside a time each day for reading your Bible and talking to God in prayer.
Find other Christians and tell them what you've done. If you know other Christians, then you could go to church with them. If not, then find a Bible-teaching church that you can attend. It is important now that you grow in your walk with God. Spiritual food, that is fellowship and teaching, as well as your own Bible study, will help you grow.
"Look unto me and be saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God and there is no other." Isaiah 45 : 22

Be holy

2010-10-02T09:40:00.001+02:00

13 Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; 14 As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance: 15 But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; 16 Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.

Practical Implications of the Attributes of God

2010-09-26T16:59:00.001+02:00

Practical Implications of the Incommunicable Attributes of God

Attribute	Scripture	Implication
Independence: God does not need us or the rest of creation for anything, yet we and the rest of creation can glorify him and bring him joy.	“The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24–25; cf. Ex. 3:14; Job 41:11;Ps. 50:9–12; 90:2).	God never experiences need, so serving God should never be motivated by the thought that he needs us. He is the provider in everything.
Immutability: God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes, and promises, although as he acts in response to different situations he feels emotions.	“For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed” (Mal. 3:6; for “being,” cf. Ps. 102:25–27; Mal. 3:6; James 1:17; for “purposes,” cf. Ps. 33:11; Isa. 46:9–11; for “promises,” cf. Num. 23:19; Rom. 11:29).	God can always be trusted because he always keeps his word, and is never capricious or moody.
Eternity: God has no beginning or end and is in no way bound by time, although he sees events and acts in his world in time, which is in fact one dimension of the created order.	“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Ps. 90:2; cf.Ex. 3:14; Job 36:26; Ps. 90:4; Isa. 46:9–10; John 8:58; 1 Tim. 6:16; 2 Pet. 3:8; Jude 24–25; Rev. 1:8; 4:8).	Those who trust the God of eternity can know peace, rest, and comfort in the busyness of life and in spite of impending death, for God keeps them in safety and joy forever.
Omnipresence: God does not have spatial dimensions and is present everywhere with his whole being, though he acts differently in different situations.	“Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth?” (Jer. 23:23–24; cf.1 Kings 8:27; Ps. 139:7–10; Isa. 66:1–2; Acts 7:48–50).	God can be sought anywhere regardless of place. Believers should never feel lonely, and the wicked should never feel safe.

Practical Implications of the Communicable Attributes of God

Attribute	Scripture	Implication
Holiness: God is absolutely and uniquely excellent above all creation (majesty) and without sin (purity).	“And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!’” (Rev. 4:8; for “majestic holiness,” cf. Ex. 15:11; 1 Chron. 16:27–29; Isa. 57:15; for “moral holiness,” cf. Isa. 5:16; 6:1–8; Acts 3:14; Heb. 7:26).	God should be feared and obeyed, and his people should earnestly pursue moral purity.
Omnipotence:God is able to do all his holy will.	“Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’” (Isa. 46:9–10; cf. Ex. 6:3; Job 37:23; 40:2; 42:1–6;Ps. 24:6; 33:10–11; 91:1; Dan. 4:34–35; Matt. 28:18).	God's ultimate will is never frustrated by evil, so there is peace and confidence in the face of suffering for those who trust God.
Sovereignty:God has absolute rule over creation as King and total control and determination over all that happens.	“His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” (Dan. 4:34–35; cf. 1 Chron. 29:11–13; Ps. 22:28; 24:1; 47:7–9; 103:19; Prov. 16:19, 21, 33; Dan. 4:25; 7:1–28; 12:1–13;Matt. 6:13; 10:29; Acts 17:26; Eph. 1:11; 1 Tim. 6:15; James 1:13–15).	Mankind should obey and submit to God as humble subjects of his kingdom.
Omniscience:God fully knows himself and all things actual and possible—past, present, and future.	“Whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:20; cf. Job 28:24; 37:16; Ps. 139:1–3; 147:5; Isa. 55:8–9; Matt. 10:29–30; Rom. 11:33–34; 1 Cor. 2:10–11; Heb. 4:13).	All God's thoughts and actions are perfectly informed by perfect knowledge, so he is perfectly trustworthy.
Wisdom: God always knows and chooses the best goals and the best means to those goals. Wisdom is a moral as well as an intellectual quality.	“Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might” (Dan. 2:20; cf. Job 9:4; 12:13; Ps. 104:24;Rom. 11:33; 16:27; 1 Cor. 1:21–29; Eph. 3:10–11).	God's wisdom is not always clear to us, but it is great, deep, valuable, and should be highly desired and sought, and we should not doubt its reality even in circumstances that upset us.
Love: God freely and eternally gives of himself. The ultimate historical demonstration of God's love is seen in the cross of Christ.	“Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:8–10; cf. John 3:16; 15:13; 17:24; Rom. 5:8; 8:31–39; Gal. 2:20; 1 John 3:16; 4:16).	God is eager to extravagantly give of himself to meet the needs of lost sinners, so they should flee to him with confidence (cf. Rom. 8:32).
Wrath: God intensely hates and responds with anger to all sin and rebellion. God hates every threat to what he loves.	“Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb’” (Rev. 6:15–16; cf. Ex. 34:7;Rom. 1:18; 2:4; 2 Cor. 5:10; 2 Thess. 1:5; 2 Pet. 3:9).	God should be greatly feared. Unbelievers should fear his judgment and turn to Christ for salvation. Believers should fear God's fatherly discipline. The God who loves us is also the holy God who hates sin (1 Pet. 1:17).

Jesus Is God: Specific Examples Where Greek Theos (“God”) Is Applied to Jesus

2010-09-04T15:10:00.000+02:00

John 1:1	In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:18	No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.
John 20:28	Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”
Rom. 9:5	To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who isGod over all, blessed forever. Amen.
Titus 2:13	… waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ …
Heb. 1:8	But of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.”
2 Pet. 1:1	To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our Godand Savior Jesus Christ …

Church Leaders Should Likewise Lead Lives That Are Examples to Imitate

2010-08-27T18:01:00.000+02:00

Phil. 3:17	Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the exampleyou have in us.
1 Tim. 4:12	Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.
Titus 2:7–8	Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech.
Heb. 13:7	Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.
1 Pet. 5:2–3	Shepherd the flock of God … not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.

Who Will Answer

2010-08-06T17:33:00.001+02:00

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!, Hallelujah!

From the canyons of the mind,
We wander on and stumble blindly
Through the often-tangled maze
Of starless nights and sunless days,
While asking for some kind of clue
Or road to lead us to the truth,
But who will answer?

Side by side two people stand,
Together vowing, hand-in-hand
That love's imbedded in their hearts,
But soon an empty feeling starts
To overwhelm their hollow lives,
And when they seek the hows and whys,
Who will answer?

On a strange and distant hill,
A young man's lying very still.
His arms will never hold his child,
Because a bullet running wild
Has struck him down. And now we cry,
"Dear God, Oh, why, oh, why?"
But who will answer?

High upon a lonely ledge,
a figure teeters near the edge,
And jeering crowds collect below
To egg him on with, "Go, man, go!"
But who will ask what led him
To his private day of doom,
And who will answer?

(Chorus)

If the soul is darkened
By a fear it cannot name,
If the mind is baffled
When the rules don't fit the game,
Who will answer? Who will answer? Who will answer?
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!, Hallelujah!

In the rooms of dark and shades,
The scent of sandalwood pervades.
The colored thoughts in muddled heads
Reclining in the rumpled beds
Of unmade dreams that can't come true,
And when we ask what we should do,
Who... Who will answer?

'Neath the spreading mushroom tree,
The world revolves in apathy
As overhead, a row of specks
Roars on, drowned out by discotheques,
And if a secret button's pressed
Because one man has been outguessed,
Who will answer?

Is our hope in walnut shells
Worn 'round the neck with temple bells,
Or deep within some cloistered walls
Where hooded figures pray in halls?
Or crumbled books on dusty shelves,
Or in our stars, or in ourselves,
Who will answer?

If the soul is darkened
By a fear it cannot name,
If the mind is baffled
When the rules don't fit the game,
Who will answer? Who will answer? Who will answer?
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!, Hallelujah!

John 8:36: So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

2010-08-04T23:39:00.003+02:00

Of course, he is right as to the matter of Islam.

Hebrews 12:1, Calvin Commentaries

2010-08-04T17:13:00.001+02:00

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us

1. Wherefore, seeing we also, etc. This conclusion is, as it were, an epilogue to the former chapter, by which he shows the end for which he gave a catalogue of the saints who excelled in faith under the Law, even that every one should be prepared to imitate them; and he calls a large multitude metaphorically a cloud, for he sets what is dense in opposition to what is thinly scattered. Had they been a few in number, yet they ought to have roused us by their example; but as they were a vast throng, they ought more powerfully to stimulate us.

He says that we are so surrounded by this dense throng, that wherever we turn our eyes many examples of faith immediately meet us. The word witnesses I do not take in a general sense, as though he called them the martyrs of God, and I apply it to the case before us, as though he had said that faith is sufficiently proved by their testimony, so that no doubt ought to be entertained; for the virtues of the saints are so many testimonies to confirm us, that we, relying on them as our guides and associates, ought to go onward to God with more alacrity.

Let us lay aside every weight, or every burden, etc. As he refers to the likeness of a race, he bids us to be lightly equipped; for nothing more prevents haste than to be encumbered with burdens. Now there are various burdens which delay and impede our spiritual course, such as the love of this present life, the pleasures of the world, the lusts of the flesh, worldly cares, riches also and honors, and other things of this kind. Whosoever, then, would run in the course prescribed by Christ, must first disentangle himself from all these impediments, for we are already of ourselves more tardy than we ought to be, so no other causes of delay should be added.

We are not however bidden to cast away riches or other blessings of this life, except so far as they retard our course for Satan by these as by toils retains and impedes us.

Now, the metaphor of a race is often to be found in Scripture; but here it means not any kind of race, but a running contest, which is wont to call forth the greatest exertions. The import of what is said then is, that we are engaged in a contest, even in a race the most celebrated, that many witnesses stand around us, that the Son of God is the umpire who invites and exhorts us to secure the prize, and that therefore it would be most disgraceful for us to grow weary or inactive in the midst of our course. And at the same time the holy men whom he mentioned, are not only witnesses, but have been associates in the same race, who have beforehand shown the way to us; and yet he preferred calling them witnesses rather than runners, in order to intimate that they are not rivals, seeking to snatch from us the prize, but approves to applaud and hail our victory; and Christ also is not only the umpire, but also extends his hand to us, and supplies us with strength and energy; in short, he prepares and fits us to enter on our course, and by his power leads us on to the end of the race.

And the sin which does so easily beset us, or, stand around us, etc. This is the heaviest burden that impedes us. And he says that we are entangled, in order that we may know, that no one is fit to run except he has stripped off all toils and snares. He speaks not of outward, or, as they say, of actual sin, but of the very fountain, even concupiscence or lust, which so possesses every part of us, that we feel that we are on every side held by its snares.

Let us run with patience, etc. By this word patience, we are ever reminded of what the Apostle meant to be mainly regarded in faith, even that we are in spirit to seek the kingdom of God, which is invisible to the flesh, and exceeds all that our minds can comprehend; for they who are occupied in meditating on this kingdom can easily disregard all earthly things. He thus could not more effectually withdraw the Jews from their ceremonies, than by calling their attention to the real exercises of faith, by which they might learn that Christ’s kingdom is spiritual, and far superior to the elements of the world.

Förnuftets röst, äntligen

2010-07-27T12:14:00.003+02:00

Lazy days

2010-07-16T10:10:00.000+02:00

Per Gudmundson ställer en fråga till Robert Spencer

2010-07-15T09:51:00.000+02:00

Unbiased Swedish media? Hardly. Please do not talk about intolerance, when the bigotry is so obvious.

INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

2010-06-27T10:21:00.000+02:00

BOOK THIRD. - THE MODE OF OBTAINING THE GRACE OF CHRIST.
THE BENEFITS IT CONFERS, AND THE EFFECTS RESULTING FROM IT./CHAPTER 13. - TWO THINGS TO BE OBSERVED IN GRATUITOUS JUSTIFICATION.:
CHAPTER 13.

TWO THINGS TO BE OBSERVED IN GRATUITOUS JUSTIFICATION.

The divisions of this chapter are,—I. The glory of God, and peace of conscience, both secured by gratuitous justification. An insult to the glory of God to glory in ourselves and seek justification out of Christ, whose righteousness, apprehended by faith, is imputed to all the elect for reconciliation and eternal salvation, sec. 1, 2. II. Peace of conscience cannot be obtained in any other way than by gratuitous justification. This fully proved, sec. 3-5.

Sections.

1. The glory of God remains untarnished, when he alone is acknowledged to be just. This proved from Scripture.

2. Those who glory in themselves glory against God. Objection. Answer, confirmed by the authority of Paul and Peter.

3. Peace of conscience obtained by free justification only. Testimony of Solomon, of conscience itself, and the Apostle Paul, who contends that faith is made vain if righteousness come by the law.

4. The promise confirmed by faith in the mercy of Christ. This is confirmed by Augustine and Bernard, is in accordance with what has been above stated, and is illustrated by clear predictions of the prophets.

5. Farther demonstration by an Apostle. Refutation of a sophism.

1. Here two ends must be kept specially in view, namely, that the glory of God be maintained unimpaired, and that our consciences, in the view of his tribunal, be secured in peaceful rest and calm tranquillity. When the question relates to righteousness, we see how often and how anxiously Scripture exhorts us to give the whole praise of it to God. Accordingly, the Apostle testifies that the purpose of the Lord in conferring righteousness upon us in Christ, was to demonstrate his own righteousness. The nature of this demonstration he immediately subjoins—viz. “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus,” (Rom. 3:25). Observe, that the righteousness of God is not sufficiently displayed, unless He alone is held to be righteous, and freely communicates righteousness to the undeserving. For this reason it is his will, that “every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God,” (Rom. 3:19). For so long as a man has any thing, however small, to say in his own defense, so long he deducts somewhat from the glory of God. Thus we are taught in Ezekiel how much we glorify his name by acknowledging our iniquity: “Then shall ye remember your ways and all your doings, wherein ye have been defiled; and ye shall loathe yourselves in your own sight, for all your evils that ye have committed. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have wrought with you for my name’s sake, not according to your wicked ways, nor according to your corrupt doings,” (Ezek. 20:43, 44). If part of the true knowledge of God consists in being oppressed by a consciousness of our own iniquity, and in recognizing him as doing good to those who are unworthy of it, why do we attempt, to our great injury, to steal from the Lord even one particle of the praise of unmerited kindness? In like manner, when Jeremiah exclaims, “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches: but let him that glorieth glory” in the Lord (Jer. 9:23, 24), does he not intimate, that the glory of the Lord is infringed when man glories in himself? To this purpose, indeed, Paul accommodates the words when he says, that all the parts of our salvation are treasured up with Christ, that we may glory only in the Lord (1 Cor. 1:29). For he intimates, that whosoever imagines he has any thing of his own, rebels against God, and obscures his glory.

2. Thus, indeed, it is: we never truly glory in him until we have utterly discarded our own glory. It must, therefore, be regarded as an universal proposition, that whoso glories in himself glories against God. Paul indeed considers, that the whole world is not made subject to God until every ground of glorying has been withdrawn from men (Rom. 3:19). Accordingly, Isaiah, when he declares that “in the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified” adds, “and shall glory” (Isa. 45:25 ), as if he had said that the elect are justified by the Lord, in order that they may glory in him, and in none else. The way in which we are to glory in the Lord he had explained in the preceding verse, “Unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear;” “Surely, shall one say, in the Lord have I righteousness and strength, even to him shall men come.” Observe, that the thing required is not simple confession, but confession confirmed by an oath, that it might not be imagined that any kind of fictitious humility might suffice. And let no man here allege that he does not glory, when without arrogance he recognizes his own righteousness; such a recognition cannot take place without generating confidence, nor such confidence without begetting boasting. Let us remember, therefore, that in the whole discussion concerning justification the great thing to be attended to is, that God’s glory be maintained entire and unimpaired; since as the Apostle declares, it was in demonstration of his own righteousness that he shed his favor upon us; it was “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus,” (Rom. 3:26). Hence, in another passage, having said that the Lord conferred salvation upon us, in order that he might show forth the glory of his name (Eph. 1:6), he afterwards, as if repeating the same thing, adds, “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast,” (Eph. 2:8). And Peter, when he reminds us that we are called to the hope of salvation, “that ye should show forth the praises of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light,” (1 Pet. 2:9), doubtless intends thus to proclaim in the ears of believers only the praises of God, that they may bury in profound silence all arrogance of the flesh. The sum is, that man cannot claim a single particle of righteousness to himself, without at the same time detracting from the glory of the divine righteousness.

3. If we now inquire in what way the conscience can be quieted as in the view of God, we shall find that the only way is by having righteousness bestowed upon us freely by the gift of God. Let us always remember the words of Solomon, “Who can say I have made my heart clean, I am free from my sin?” (Prov. 20:9). Undoubtedly there is not one man who is not covered with infinite pollutions. Let the most perfect man descend into his own conscience, and bring his actions to account, and what will the result be? Will he feel calm and quiescent, as if all matters were well arranged between himself and God; or will he not rather be stung with dire torment, when he sees that the ground of condemnation is within him if he be estimated by his works? Conscience, when it beholds God, must either have sure peace with his justice, or be beset by the terrors of hell. We gain nothing, therefore, by discoursing of righteousness, unless we hold it to be a righteousness stable enough to support our souls before the tribunal of God. When the soul is able to appear intrepidly in the presence of God, and receive his sentence without dismay, then only let us know that we have found a righteousness that is not fictitious. It is not, therefore, without cause, that the Apostle insists on this matter. I prefer giving it in his words rather than my own: “If they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of no effect,” (Rom. 4:14). He first infers that faith is made void if the promise of righteousness has respect to the merit of our works, or depends on the observance of the law. Never could any one rest securely in it, for never could he feel fully assured that he had fully satisfied the law; and it is certain that no man ever fully satisfied it by works. Not to go far for proof of this, every one who will use his eyes aright may be his own witness. Hence it appears how deep and dark the abyss is into which hypocrisy plunges the minds of men, when they indulge so securely as, without hesitations to oppose their flattery to the judgment of God, as if they were relieving him from his office as judge. Very different is the anxiety which fills the breasts of believers, who sincerely examine themselves.42 23 423 The two previous sentences are ommited in the French. Every mind, therefore, would first begin to hesitate, and at length to despair, while each determined for itself with how great a load of debt it was still oppressed, and how far it was from coming up to the enjoined condition. Thus, then, faith would be oppressed and extinguished. To have faith is not to fluctuate, to vary, to be carried up and down, to hesitate, remain in suspense, vacillate, in fine, to despair; it is to possess sure certainty and complete security of mind, to have whereon to rest and fix your foot.

4. Paul, moreover, adds, that the promise itself would be rendered null and void. For if its fulfillment depends on our merits when pray, will we be able to come the length of meriting the favor of God? Nay, the second clause is a consequence of the former, since the promise will not be fulfilled unless to those who put faith in it. Faith therefore failing, no power will remain in the promise. “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace, to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed,” (Rom. 4:16). It was abundantly confirmed when made to rest on the mercy of God alone, for mercy and truth are united by an indissoluble tie; that is, whatever God has mercifully promised he faithfully performs. Thus David, before he asks salvation according to the word of God, first places the source of it in his mercy. “Let, I pray thee, thy merciful kindness be for my comfort, according to thy word unto thy servant,” (Ps. 119:76). And justly, for nothing but mere mercy induces God to promise. Here, then, we must place, and, as it were, firmly fix our whole hope, paying no respect to our works, and asking no assistance from them. And lest you should suppose that there is any thing novel in what I say, Augustine also enjoins us so to act. “Christ,” says he, “will reign forever among his servants. This God has promised, God has spoken; if this is not enough, God has sworn. Therefore, as the promise stands firm, not in respect of our merits, but in respect of his mercy, no one ought to tremble in announcing that of which he cannot doubt,” (August. in Ps. 88, Tract. 50). Thus Bernard also, “Who can be saved? ask the disciples of Christ. He replies, With men it is impossible, but not with God. This is our whole confidence, this our only consolation; this the whole ground of our hope: but being assured of the possibility, what are we to say as to his willingness? Who knows whether he is deserving of love or hatred? (Eccles. 9:1). ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?’ (1 Cor. 2:16). Here it is plain, faith must come to our aid: here we must have the assistance of truth, in order that the secret purpose of the Father respecting us may be revealed by the Spirit, and the Spirit testifying may persuade our hearts that we are the sons of God. But let him persuade by calling and justifying freely by faith: in these there is a kind of transition from eternal predestination to future glory,” (Bert. in Dedica. Templi, Serm. 5). Let us thus briefly conclude: Scripture indicates that the promises of God are not surer unless they are apprehended with full assurance of conscience; it declares that wherever there is doubt or uncertainty, the promises are made void; on the other hand, that they can only waver and fluctuate if they depend on our works. Therefore, either our righteousness must perish, or without any consideration of our works, place must be given to faith alone, whose nature it is to prick up the ear, and shut the eye; that is, to be intent on the promise only, to give up all idea of any dignity or merit in man. Thus is fulfilled the celebrated prophecy of Zechariah: “I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day. In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, shall ye call every man his neighbor under the vine, and under the fig-tree,” (Zech. 3:9, 10). Here the prophet intimates that the only way in which believers can enjoy true peace, is by obtaining the remission of their sins. For we must attend to this peculiarity in the prophets, that when they discourse of the kingdom of Christ, they set forth the external mercies of God as types of spiritual blessings. Hence Christ is called the Prince of Peace, and our peace, Isaiah 9:6; Eph. 2:14), because he calms all the agitations of conscience. If the method is asked, we must come to the sacrifice by which God was appeased, for no man will ever cease to tremble, until he hold that God is propitiated solely by that expiation in which Christ endured his anger. In short, peace must be sought nowhere but in the agonies of Christ our Redeemer.

5. But why employ a more obscure testimony? Paul uniformly declares that the conscience can have no peace or quiet joy until it is held for certain that we are justified by faith. And he at the same time declares whence this certainty is derived—viz. when “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost,” (Rom. 5:5); as if he had said that our Souls cannot have peace until we are fully assured that we are pleasing to God. Hence he elsewhere exclaims in the person of believers in general, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Rom. 8:35). Until we have reached that haven, the slightest breeze will make us tremble, but so long as the Lord is our Shepherd, we shall walk without fear in the valley of the shadow of death (Ps. 23). Thus those who pretend that justification by faith consists in being regenerated and made just, by living spiritually, have never tasted the sweetness of grace in trusting that God will be propitious. Hence also, they know no more of praying aright than do the Turks or any other heathen people. For, as Paul declares, faith is not true, unless it suggest and dictate the delightful name of Father; nay, unless it open our mouths and enable us freely to cry, Abba, Father. This he expresses more clearly in another passage, “In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him,” (Eph. 3:12). This, certainly, is not obtained by the gift of regeneration, which, as it is always defective in the present state, contains within it many grounds of doubt. Wherefore, we must have recourse to this remedy; we must hold that the only hope which believers have of the heavenly inheritance is, that being in grafted into the body of Christ, they are justified freely. For, in regard to justification, faith is merely passives bringing nothing of our own to procure the favor of God, but receiving from Christ every thing that we want.

Proverbs 25

2010-06-27T10:19:00.000+02:00

Proverbs 25:1: These also are proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied.

Proverbs 25:2: It is the glory of God to conceal things,
but the glory of kings is to search things out.

Proverbs 25:3: As the heavens for height, and the earth for depth,
so the heart of kings is unsearchable.

Proverbs 25:4: Take away the dross from the silver,
and the smith has material for a vessel;

Proverbs 25:5: take away the wicked from the presence of the king,
and his throne will be established in righteousness.

Proverbs 25:6: Do not put yourself forward in the king's presence
or stand in the place of the great,

Proverbs 25:7: for it is better to be told, “Come up here,”
than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.
What your eyes have seen

Proverbs 25:8: do not hastily bring into court,
for what will you do in the end,
when your neighbor puts you to shame?

Proverbs 25:9: Argue your case with your neighbor himself,
and do not reveal another's secret,

Proverbs 25:10: lest he who hears you bring shame upon you,
and your ill repute have no end.

Proverbs 25:11: A word fitly spoken
is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

Proverbs 25:12: Like a gold ring or an ornament of gold
is a wise reprover to a listening ear.

Proverbs 25:13: Like the cold of snow in the time of harvest
is a faithful messenger to those who send him;
he refreshes the soul of his masters.

Proverbs 25:14: Like clouds and wind without rain
is a man who boasts of a gift he does not give.

Proverbs 25:15: With patience a ruler may be persuaded,
and a soft tongue will break a bone.

Proverbs 25:16: If you have found honey, eat only enough for you,
lest you have your fill of it and vomit it.

Proverbs 25:17: Let your foot be seldom in your neighbor's house,
lest he have his fill of you and hate you.

Proverbs 25:18: A man who bears false witness against his neighbor
is like a war club, or a sword, or a sharp arrow.

Proverbs 25:19: Trusting in a treacherous man in time of trouble
is like a bad tooth or a foot that slips.

Proverbs 25:20: Whoever sings songs to a heavy heart
is like one who takes off a garment on a cold day,
and like vinegar on soda.

Proverbs 25:21: If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat,
and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink,

Proverbs 25:22: for you will heap burning coals on his head,
and the LORD will reward you.

Proverbs 25:23: The north wind brings forth rain,
and a backbiting tongue, angry looks.

Proverbs 25:24: It is better to live in a corner of the housetop
than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife.

Proverbs 25:25: Like cold water to a thirsty soul,
so is good news from a far country.

Proverbs 25:26: Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain
is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.

Proverbs 25:27: It is not good to eat much honey,
nor is it glorious to seek one's own glory.

Proverbs 25:28: A man without self-control
is like a city broken into and left without walls.

ESV Study Bible: June 23, 2010

2010-06-26T12:59:00.001+02:00

Psalms and Wisdom: Proverbs 25-26
Pentateuch and History: Deuteronomy 26
Chronicles and Prophets: Micah 1-2
Gospels and Epistles: Matthew 5:17-48

http://www.esvonline.org/

New Design

2010-06-25T21:02:00.001+02:00

I do not know… But the old one was soooo… old, and all the new gadgets and the ease of editing things now tempted me far too much to resist.

You judge :)

What would the devil say about your life?

2010-02-11T21:43:00.001+01:00

By Steve Camp

Whose blessings?

2010-02-10T21:58:00.001+01:00

A priest(ess) of a godless church of Sweden. A huge audience of young people seeking consolation and hope. A painful reality of loss. Death. Final. No computer game. True and cold depth of despair. Opposite there is another despair of today's life: Political Correctness, over all and above all, for any cost.
So what do these young people hear from a person who looks like a representative of Christ's church on Earth? They hear about the impossibility of assessing sorrow. They hear about Haiti. They hear about winter. They hear about nature. Finally they hear blessings to nature and their future. It is all very emotional, very down-played, very elegant. So what is lacking? Why is the whole thing empty, or, as some of the students expressed it afterward, artificial? Why do the students who are supposed to be well-groomed into the secular way of thinking do not buy the whole thing?
Because it is artificial. It is not true. It is false, hollow, empty. A priest without the object of worship. A blessing without the author. A consolation without hope. Christless Christianity in a PC country.
Please pray for the revival, join me in this prayer, for the whole world.

Revive us, oh Lord

2010-01-21T22:06:00.000+01:00

Some New Year Bible Readings

2010-01-02T00:11:00.001+01:00

This passing of time has finally caught up with me. Not that I feel awfully old yet, but, nevertheless, the realization of the number of years makes itself louder and louder in my consciousness. When days like today come, they point me towards the end of it all more and more stubbornly.
You live your little life, day by day, hour by hour, without as much as giving the slightest thought about why - where to - who for - how questions. Until the day some misfortune happens to you, or some physical problem gets to you. Then you suddenly understand you are not invincible and immortal, and you start to question the reasons and the results.

Ecclesiastes 1
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
See, this is new?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.

12 I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem.
13 And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.
14 I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
15 What is crooked cannot be made straight,
and what is lacking cannot be counted.

16 I said in my heart, I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.
17 And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.
18 For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

The words of David fit perfectly into the state of mind a human being is confronted with while pondering over these things. There is no hope, no purpose, no gain, ultimately. If this were the only message there is, we would indeed be pitiful and miserable creatures (well, this last word is not politically correct, because the ONLY PC nowadays is spontaneous becoming out of the primordial soup). Fortunately, as Dave Berlinski says, "atheism is an adolescent preoccupation", and hopefully people grow out of it at some point.
My second quotation from the Bible is from Jeremiah, where the words of despair and utter hopelessness are followed by the words of hope and purpose. God is Good, isn't He?

Jeremiah 10
1 Hear the word that the LORD speaks to you, O house of Israel.
2 Thus says the LORD:
Learn not the way of the nations,
nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens
because the nations are dismayed at them,
3 for the customs of the peoples are vanity.
A tree from the forest is cut down
and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.
4 They decorate it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so that it cannot move.
5 Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field,
and they cannot speak;
they have to be carried,
for they cannot walk.
Do not be afraid of them,
for they cannot do evil,
neither is it in them to do good.
6 There is none like you, O LORD;
you are great, and your name is great in might.
7 Who would not fear you, O King of the nations?
For this is your due;
for among all the wise ones of the nations
and in all their kingdoms
there is none like you.
8 They are both stupid and foolish;
the instruction of idols is but wood!
9 Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish,
and gold from Uphaz.
They are the work of the craftsman and of the hands of the goldsmith;
their clothing is violet and purple;
they are all the work of skilled men.
10 But the LORD is the true God;
he is the living God and the everlasting King.
At his wrath the earth quakes,
and the nations cannot endure his indignation.

11 Thus shall you say to them: The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.
12 It is he who made the earth by his power,
who established the world by his wisdom,
and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.
13 When he utters his voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens,
and he makes the mist rise from the ends of the earth.
He makes lightning for the rain,
and he brings forth the wind from his storehouses.
14 Every man is stupid and without knowledge;
every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols,
for his images are false,
and there is no breath in them.
15 They are worthless, a work of delusion;
at the time of their punishment they shall perish.
16 Not like these is he who is the portion of Jacob,
for he is the one who formed all things,
and Israel is the tribe of his inheritance;
the LORD of hosts is his name.
17 Gather up your bundle from the ground,
O you who dwell under siege!
18 For thus says the LORD:
Behold, I am slinging out the inhabitants of the land
at this time,
and I will bring distress on them,
that they may feel it.
19 Woe is me because of my hurt!
My wound is grievous.
But I said, Truly this is an affliction,
and I must bear it.
20 My tent is destroyed,
and all my cords are broken;
my children have gone from me,
and they are not;
there is no one to spread my tent again
and to set up my curtains.
21 For the shepherds are stupid
and do not inquire of the LORD;
therefore they have not prospered,
and all their flock is scattered.
22 A voice, a rumor! Behold, it comes!—
a great commotion out of the north country
to make the cities of Judah a desolation,
a lair of jackals.
23 I know, O LORD, that the way of man is not in himself,
that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps.
24 Correct me, O LORD, but in justice;
not in your anger, lest you bring me to nothing.
25 Pour out your wrath on the nations that know you not,
and on the peoples that call not on your name,
for they have devoured Jacob;
they have devoured him and consumed him,
and have laid waste his habitation.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-22T08:56:00.002+01:00

Climate or power?

2009-12-12T15:18:00.001+01:00

I couldn't avoid stumbling upon lots of articles, videos, notes, PMs, and other interesting stuff concerning the ClimateGate uproar. Not in the official media channels, of course, but everywhere else. A fair amount of thoughts is due here, and impossible to put on paper/blog. There is, however, one prevailing aspect to all of the media hype, that is impossible to disregard and to shovel under the carpet. After reading the today's propaganda piece in a Swedish newspaper, the source here, I am finally beginning to see a clear pattern of the way the Earth population has been brainwashed and depraved of knowledge in the last 50 years or so. I belong to the generation that got proper education of facts and relationships between cause and effect. We were lied to concerning politics (a former communist country), but our schools delivered what they were supposed to deliver. We know our facts, we remember our biology, geography, physics, chemistry. We still wake up in the middle of the night reciting formulas :).
I am a part of another school system now. This one has nothing in common with impartial knowledge, but everything in common with relativism and politicizing in the name of some "higher cause", whatever that means at a given moment. My students are taught to "quest for information", the best way they can, without first be given the foundation to stand on. Their so called "research" is extremely shallow and shaky, and is not to be questioned as to its relevance, but only to the effort that was put into it. They are rewarded for the amount of work, but not for the quality of it. They are taught to question everything - which is good - but they do it with their feet firmly set in the thin air. We now produce a generation of ignorants who will swallow every 'truth' given to them by the official media, because even though they have been taught to question everything, they do not bother to, having experienced the ineffectiveness of this process and seeing that any result is fine, as long as the amount of work put into it is sufficient.
In the mentioned Swedish article the author comes with the most laughable thesis yet: that the man-made climate change is so great, that the scientist have to rewrite the maps to adjust them to the present state of reality. Moreover, as main examples of the changes in climate the author speaks of the Aral Lake and the Tchad Lake. Poorly educated audience will swallow anything, it seems. Poorly educated audience have no idea about history of the Aral Lake and the reasons why it shrinked to null.
One wonders: is there some underlying agenda as to why we have this poorly educated audience? In case you wonder, I think this agenda is obvious: it is very much easier to manipulate a crowd who knows little or nothing.

Well, I refuse to be manipulated, I refuse to be politically correct, I refuse to give in to some humanistic idiocy of environmental religion. My only allegiance is to Christ and His Kingdom.

Until He comes, I will be just watching closely the madness of bewildered humanity in its search for meaning... And pointing anyone whom I meet to the only hope there is - to His Word.

Taking a break

2009-08-31T00:48:00.003+02:00

The duties of work and family, and the survival mode because of these, make me take a break in this blogging activity. I simply cannot find time to think, write, edit, and evaluate.

I will come back, as soon as I find my rythm and put my life in order.

God Bless...

Interesting

2009-08-30T00:01:00.001+02:00

NAMPA, ID - A Christian missionary support agency says a piece of mission history is part of this week's space shuttle mission.

Mission Aviation Fellowship says Discovery astronaut Patrick Forrester received NASA permission to take part of the battery box from martyred missionary Nate Saint's plane into space with him. Saint and four other missionaries were slain by an isolated tribe in the jungles of Ecuador in 1956.

If only I could...

2009-08-29T00:10:00.002+02:00

The Certificate program of Ligonier Academy of Biblical and Theological Studies is a non-degree distance education curriculum designed for laypeople, ministers, and educators who desire a structured way to study biblical and theological subjects at their own pace, at their own level of interest, and in their own home. Ligonier Academy offers three levels of study in the Certificate program: Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced.

Introductory Level
The Introductory Level certificates are designed for those who are looking to cover the basics. These certificates assume no prior study of the subject matter. The topics of study available at the introductory level are:

Biblical Studies
Theology
Philosophy
Apologetics
Church History (Available soon)

The tuition for the Introductory certificates is $175. For more information on the topics of study available at this level, the cost of the program, and the course requirements, click on the link below.

Introductory Level Certificates

Intermediate Level
The Intermediate Level certificates are designed for those who have mastered the basics and would like to study a topic more thoroughly. These certificates assume minimal prior study. These programs will include instruction and tutelage from Dr. Keith Mathison, Dr. R.C. Sproul, Jr., and Dr. Fowler White. The topics of study available at the intermediate level are:

Biblical Studies
Systematic Theology
Church History
Philosophy
Apologetics

The tuition for the Intermediate certificates is $350. For more information on the topics of study available at this level, the cost of the program, and the course requirements, click on the link below.

Intermediate Level Certificates

Advanced Level
The Advanced Level certificates are designed for those who desire an in-depth study of a particular subject. These certificates assume prior study and a willingness to do a large amount of reading over the course of two to three years.These programs will include instruction and tutelage from Dr. Keith Mathison, Dr. R.C. Sproul, Jr., and Dr. Fowler White. The topics of study available at the advanced level are:

Biblical Studies
Systematic Theology
Church History
Philosophy
Apologetics
Ethics
Historical Theology
Theology of the Westminster Confession
Christian Studies

The tuition for the Advanced certificates is $500. For more information on the topics of study available at this level, the cost of the program, and the course requirements, click on the link below.

Advanced Level Certificates

We encourage potential students to examine the course requirements carefully in order to determine which certificate is best suited to his or her interests.

Christian Dating- LaneCh & Susan Yenser

2009-08-28T00:52:00.001+02:00

I love them both, two very dear friends of mine.

Tears of the Saints

2009-08-27T00:48:00.000+02:00

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-26T00:56:00.000+02:00

Morning:

Thou shalt make a plate [of] pure gold, and grave upon it,
[like] the engravings of a signet, HOLINESS TO THE LORD.

Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.--God [is]
a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship [him] in spirit
and in truth.--But we are all as an unclean [thing], and all our
righteousnesses [are] as filthy rags.--I will be sanctified in
them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be
glorified.

This [is] the law of the house; Upon the top of the mountain
the whole limit thereof round about [shall be] most holy.--
Holiness becometh thine house, O LORD, for ever.

For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be
sanctified through the truth.--Seeing . . . that we have a great
high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of
God, let us . . . come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we
may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.

Ex 28:36 Heb 12:14 Joh 4:24 Isa 64:6 Le 10:3 Eze 43:12
Ps 93:5 Joh 17:19 Heb 4:14,16

Evening:

My cup runneth over.

O taste and see that the LORD [is] good: blessed [is] the man
[that] trusteth in him. O fear the LORD, ye his saints: for
[there is] no want to them that fear him. The young lions do
lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the LORD shall not
want any good [thing].--His compassions fail not. [They are] new
every morning: great [is] thy faithfulness.

The LORD [is] the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup:
thou maintainest my lot. The lines are fallen unto me in
pleasant [places]; yea, I have a goodly heritage.--Whether . . .
the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to
come; all are yours.--Blessed [be] the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual
blessings in heavenly [places] in Christ.

I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, [therewith] to be
content.--Godliness with contentment is great gain.--My God
shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by
Christ Jesus.

Ps 23:5 34:8-10 La 3:22,23 Ps 16:5,6 1Co 3:22 Eph 1:3 Php 4:11
1Ti 6:6 Php 4:19

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-25T00:55:00.000+02:00

Morning:

I know their sorrows.

A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.--Touched with
the feeling of our infirmities.

Himself took our infirmities, and bare [our] sicknesses.--
Jesus, . . . being wearied with [his] journey, sat thus on the
well.

When Jesus . . . saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping
which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled.
. . . Jesus wept.--For in that he himself hath suffered being
tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted.

He hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary; from
heaven did the LORD behold the earth; to hear the groaning of
the prisoner; to loose those that are appointed to death.--He
knoweth the way that I take: [when] he hath tried me, I shall
come forth as gold.--When my spirit was overwhelmed within me,
then thou knewest my path.

He that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye.--In all
their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence
saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he
bare them, and carried them all the days of old.

Ex 3:7 Isa 53:3 Heb 4:15 Mt 8:17 Joh 4:6 11:33,35 Heb 2:18
Ps 102:19,20 Job 23:10 Ps 142.3 Zec 2:8 Isa 63:9

Evening:

I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day.

The soul of the sluggard desireth, and [hath] nothing: but
the soul of the diligent shall be made fat.--He that watereth
shall be watered also himself.

My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish
his work. Say not ye, There are yet four months, and [then]
cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and
look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And
he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life
eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may
rejoice together.--The kingdom of heaven is like unto a man
[that is] an householder, which went out early in the morning to
hire labourers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with
the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard.

Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season.--Occupy
till I come.

I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the
grace of God which was with me.

Joh 9:4 Pr 13:4 Pr 11:25 Joh 4:34-36 Mt 20:1,2 2Ti 4:2
Lu 19:13 1Co 15:10

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-24T00:54:00.000+02:00

Heb 10:19-25

2009-08-23T00:23:00.001+02:00

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

(Heb 10:19-25)

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-22T00:26:00.002+02:00

Morning:

None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.

Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die,
we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are
the Lord's.--Let no man seek his own, but every man another's
[wealth].--Ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in
your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.

Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether [it be] by
life, or by death. For to me to live [is] Christ, and to die
[is] gain. But if I live in the flesh, this [is] the fruit of my
labour: yet what I shall choose I wot not. For I am in a strait
betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ;
which is far better.

I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto
God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I,
but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the
flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and
gave himself for me.

Ro 14:7,8 1Co 10:24 6:20 Php 1:20-23 Ga 2:19,20

Evening:

God gave Solomon . . . largeness of heart,
even as the sand that [is] on the sea shore.

Behold, a greater than Solomon [is] here.--The Prince of
Peace.

Scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure
for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth
his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ
died for us.--Who, being in the form of God, thought it not
robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation,
and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the
likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled
himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the
cross.--The love of Christ . . . passeth knowledge.

Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.--In whom are
hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.--The unsearchable
riches of Christ.--Of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is
made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and
redemption.

1Ki 4:29 Mt 12:42 Isa 9:6 Ro 5:7,8 Php 2:6-8 Eph 3:19
1Co 1:24 Col 2:3 Eph 3:8 1Co 1:30

Do you remember?

2009-08-21T00:44:00.003+02:00

After watching this movie, I believe my Bible even more, if that is possible. Men are evil by nature, and Christ is the only SALVATION.

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-20T00:06:00.000+02:00

Morning:

God [is] not a man, that he should lie;
neither the son of man, that he should repent.

The Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither
shadow of turning.--Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day,
and for ever.

His truth [shall be thy] shield and buckler.

God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of
promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed [it] by an
oath: that by two immutable things, in which [it was] impossible
for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have
fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us.

The faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them
that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand
generations.--All the paths of the LORD [are] mercy and truth
unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies.--Happy [is
he] that [hath] the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope [is]
in the LORD his God: which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and
all that therein [is]: which keepeth truth for ever.

Nu 23:19 Jas 1:17 Heb 13:8 Ps 91:4 Heb 6:17,18 De 7:9
Ps 25:10 146:5,6

Evening:

[If] thou faint in the day of adversity,
thy strength [is] small.

He giveth power to the faint; and to [them that have] no
might he increaseth strength.--My grace is sufficient for thee:
for my strength is made perfect in weakness.--He shall call upon
me, and I will answer him: I [will be] with him in trouble; I
will deliver him, and honour him.--The eternal God [is thy]
refuge, and underneath [are] the everlasting arms: and he shall
thrust out the enemy from before thee.

I looked [for some] to take pity, but [there was] none; and
for comforters, but I found none.

Every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men in
things [pertaining] to God, . . . who can have compassion on the
ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; . . . so also
Christ . . . though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by
the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became
the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him.--
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.

Pr 24:10 Isa 40:29 2Co 12:9 Ps 91:15 De 33:27 Ps 69:20
Heb 5:1,2,5,8,9 Isa 53:4

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-19T00:05:00.000+02:00

Morning:

As he which hath called you is holy,
so be ye holy in all manner of conversation.

Ye know how we exhorted . . . and charged every one of you,
. . . that ye would walk worthy of God, who hath called you unto
his kingdom and glory.--Ye should shew forth the praises of him
who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.

Ye were sometimes darkness, but now [are ye] light in the
Lord: walk as children of light: (for the fruit of the Spirit
[is] in all goodness and righteousness and truth;) proving what
is acceptable unto the Lord. And have no fellowship with the
unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove [them].--Being
filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus
Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your
good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.--Whether
therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the
glory of God.

1Pe 1:15 1Th 2:11,12 1Pe 2:9 Eph 5:8-11 Php 1:11 Mt 5:16
1Co 10:31

Evening:

Ask me of things to come concerning my sons,
and concerning the work of my hands command ye me.

A new heart . . . will I give you, and a new spirit will I
put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your
flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my
spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. . . .
Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will yet [for] this be enquired of by
the house of Israel, to do [it] for them.

If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that
they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is
in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my
name, there am I in the midst of them.

Have faith in God. For verily I say unto you, That whosoever
shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast
into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall
believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he
shall have whatsoever he saith.

Isa 45:11 Eze 36:26,27,37 Mt 18:19,20 Mr 11:22,23

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-18T00:04:00.000+02:00

Morning:

What God [is there] in heaven or in earth, that can do
according to thy works, and according to thy might?

Who in the heaven can be compared unto the LORD? [who] among
the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the LORD? . . . O
LORD God of hosts, who [is] a strong LORD like unto thee? or to
thy faithfulness round about thee?--Among the gods [there is]
none like unto thee, O Lord; neither [are there any works] like
unto thy works.--For thy word's sake, and according to thine own
heart, hast thou done all these great things, to make thy
servant know [them]. Wherefore thou art great, O LORD God: for
[there is] none like thee, neither [is there any] God beside
thee, according to all that we have heard with our ears.

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into
the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them
that love him. But God hath revealed [them] unto us by his
Spirit.--The secret [things belong] unto the LORD our God: but
those [things which are] revealed [belong] unto us and to our
children.

De 3:24 Ps 89:6,8 86:8 2Sa 7:21,22 1Co 2:9,10 De 29:29

Evening:

He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

Let not the wise [man] glory in his wisdom, neither let the
mighty [man] glory in his might, let not the rich [man] glory in
his riches: but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he
understandeth and knoweth me, that I [am] the LORD.

I count all things [but] loss for the excellency of the
knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the
loss of all things, and do count them [but] dung, that I may win
Christ.--I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the
power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.--I have
. . . whereof I may glory through Jesus Christ in those things
which pertain to God.

Whom have I in heaven [but thee]? and [there is] none upon
earth [that] I desire beside thee.--My heart rejoiceth in the
LORD. . . . I rejoice in thy salvation.

Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but unto thy name give
glory, for thy mercy, [and] for thy truth's sake.

1Co 1:31 Jer 9:23,24 Php 3:8 Ro 1:16 15:17 Ps 73:25 1Sa 2:1
Ps 115:1

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-17T00:03:00.000+02:00

Morning:

Pray one for another, that ye may be healed.

Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me
to speak unto the Lord, which [am but] dust and ashes:
peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt
thou destroy all the city for [lack of] five? And he said, If I
find there forty and five, I will not destroy [it].

Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.--Pray
for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which
thou hast given me; for they are thine.--Neither pray I for
these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through
their word.--Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the
law of Christ.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth
much. Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he
prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on
the earth by the space of three years and six months.

Jas 5:16 Ge 18:27,28 Lu 23:34 Mt 5:44 Joh 17:9,20 Ga 6:2
Jas 5:16,17

Evening:

[As for] man, his days [are] as grass: as a flower of the
field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it,
and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

So teach [us] to number our days, that we may apply [our]
hearts unto wisdom.--What shall it profit a man, if he shall
gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Surely the people [is] grass. The grass withereth, the flower
fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.--The world
passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will
of God abideth for ever.
2 Corinthians 6:2

Behold, now [is] the accepted time; behold, now [is] the day
of salvation.--Use this world, as not abusing [it]: for the
fashion of this world passeth away.--Let us consider one another
to provoke unto love and to good works: not forsaking the
assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some [is];
but exhorting [one another]: and so much the more, as ye see the
day approaching.

Ps 103:15,16 90:12 Mr 8:36 Isa 40:7,8 1Jo 2:17 2Co 6:2
1Co 7:31 Heb 10:24,25

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-16T00:02:00.000+02:00

Morning:

The God of peace . . . make you perfect
in every good work to do his will.

Be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in
peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you.

By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: [it is] the gift of God: not of works, lest any man
should boast.--Every good gift and every perfect gift is from
above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is
no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it
is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of [his] good
pleasure.--Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that
ye may prove what [is] that good, and acceptable, and perfect,
will of God.--Being filled with the fruits of righteousness,
which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.--

Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as
of ourselves; but our sufficiency [is] of God.

Heb 13:20,21 2Co 13:11 Eph 2:8,9 Jas 1:17 Php 2:12,13
Ro 12:2 Php 1:11 2Co 3:5

Evening:

I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak comfortably unto her.

Come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord,
and touch not the unclean [thing]; and I will receive you, and
will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and
daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.--Having therefore these
promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all
filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the
fear of God.

Jesus, . . . that he might sanctify the people with his own
blood, suffered without the gate. Let us go forth therefore unto
him without the camp, bearing his reproach.

Mark 6:31

[Jesus] said, . . . Come ye yourselves apart into a desert
place, and rest a while.--The LORD [is] my shepherd; I shall not
want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me
beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in
the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Ho 2:14 2Co 6:17,18 2Co 7:1 Heb 13:12,13 Mr 6:31 Ps 23:1-3

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-15T00:02:00.000+02:00

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-14T00:01:00.000+02:00

Morning:

The joy of the LORD is your strength.

Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth; and break forth into
singing, O mountains: for the LORD hath comforted his people,
and will have mercy upon his afflicted.--Behold, God [is] my
salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for the LORD JEHOVAH
[is] my strength and [my] song; he also is become my salvation.
--The LORD [is] my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in
him, and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and
with my song will I praise him.--My soul shall be joyful in my
God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he
hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom
decketh [himself] with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth
[herself] with her jewels.

I have therefore whereof I may glory through Jesus Christ in
those things which pertain to God.--We . . . joy in God through
our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the
atonement.--I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of
my salvation.

Ne 8:10 Isa 49:13 Isa 12:2 Ps 28:7 Isa 61:10 Ro 15:17 5:11
Hab 3:18

Evening:

He hath made with me an everlasting covenant,
ordered in all [things], and sure.

I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able
to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.

Blessed [be] the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who
hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly
[places] in Christ: according as he hath chosen us in him before
the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without
blame before him in love: having predestinated us unto the
adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to
the good pleasure of his will.

We know that all things work together for good to them that
love God, to them who are the called according to [his] purpose.
For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate [to be]
conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the
firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did
predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he
also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.

2Sa 23:5 2Ti 1:12 Eph 1:3-5 Ro 8:28-30

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-13T00:01:00.000+02:00

Morning:

He hath prepared for them a city.

If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and
receive you unto myself; that where I am, [there] ye may be
also.--An inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that
fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you.--Here have we no
continuing city, but we seek one to come.

This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven,
shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.
--Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord.
Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the
earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early
and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for
the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.--Yet a little while, and he
that shall come will come, and will not tarry.

We which are alive [and] remain shall be caught up together
with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so
shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another
with these words.

Heb 11:16 Joh 14:3 1Pe 1:4 Heb 13:14 Ac 1:11 Jas 5:7,8
Heb 10:37 1Th 4:17,18

Evening:

Base things of the world . . . hath God chosen.

Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor
adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with
mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers,
nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such
were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but
ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the
Spirit of our God.

You [hath he quickened], who were dead in trespasses and
sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of
this world; . . . among whom also we all had our conversation in
times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of
the flesh and of the mind.

According to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of
regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; which he shed on
us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour.

My thoughts [are] not your thoughts, neither [are] your ways
my ways, saith the LORD.

1Co 1:28 6:9-11 Eph 2:1-3 Tit 3:5,6 Isa 55:8

Today's Devotionals

2009-08-12T00:57:00.001+02:00

Morning:

For the Lord will not cast off for ever:
but though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion.

Fear thou not, . . . saith the LORD: for I [am] with thee;
. . . I will not make a full end of thee, but correct thee in
measure.--For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with
great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my
face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will
I have mercy on thee, saith the LORD thy Redeemer. . . . For the
mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my
kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant
of my peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee.
O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, [and] not comforted,
behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy
foundations with sapphires.

I will bear the indignation of the LORD, because I have
sinned against him, until he plead my cause, and execute
judgment for me: he will bring me forth to the light, [and] I
shall behold his righteousness.

Lam 3:31,32 Jer 46:28 Isa 54:7,8,10,11 Mi 7:9

Evening:

God hath chosen the weak things of the world
to confound the things which are mighty.

When the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD
raised them up a deliverer, Ehud, . . . a man lefthanded. . . .
After him was Shamgar . . . . which slew of the Philistines six
hundred men with an ox goad: and he also delivered Israel.

The LORD looked upon [Gideon], and said, Go in this thy
might: . . . have not I sent thee? And he said unto him, Oh my
Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? behold, my family [is] poor
in Manasseh, and I [am] the least in my father's house.

And the LORD said unto Gideon, The people that [are] with
thee [are] too many for me, . . . lest Israel vaunt themselves
against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD
of hosts.--My brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power
of his might.

1Co 1:27 Jud 3:15,31 6:14,15 7:2 Zec 4:6 Eph 6:10

What does inerrancy mean? Is it essential to Christian belief?

2009-08-11T00:21:00.001+02:00

How much do you know God?

2009-08-10T00:53:00.000+02:00

The Narcissism Epidemic

2009-08-09T00:30:00.002+02:00

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Is Narcissism on the rise? And if so, has it affected American Christianity? On this edition of the White Horse Inn, Michael Horton talks with Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me, and co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.

Free w/ Registration

David Livingstone, The Pathfinder of Africa

2009-08-08T00:33:00.003+02:00

A young Scotsman had come to hear an address by a celebrated missionary. Following his conversion several years earlier, the young man had begun to grapple with the question, "What shall I do with my life?" The Great Commission had come to have a singular hold upon his mind. Its majestic syllables had for him a contemporaneous significance:

"All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." (Matt. 28:18-20).

"All authority is given unto me." The same power is available!

"Go and evangelize all nations." The same program is operative!

"Lo, I am with you." The same Presence is assured!

The young Scotsman had completed his medical education, involving two years of study in Glasgow, and was ready for some high call to which he could give his utmost. His eyes were fastened upon the speaker, Robert Moffatt, with his flowing white beard and his vehement concern for Africa's perishing millions. The depths of his soul rose up to meet the challenge of the missionary, especially that contained in one sentence of twenty words. Those twenty words are historic, used of God to write an amazing history. The twenty words used by Robert Moffatt that epochal day were these:

"I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been."

The picture embodied in these stupendous words captivated his entire being and fired his soul with a passion which only death could quench. He would go to Africa! He would be a forerunner for Christ in the Dark Continent! He would search out the thousand villages, and other thousands, where no missionary had ever been.

This young doctor was David Livingstone, born in Blantyre, Scotland, March 19, 1813. He became the Pathfinder of Africa, whose eventful career is the story of many long, exciting, winding trails.

Continue reading: http://www.wholesomewords.org/missions/giants/biolivingstone.html

And if you want to find out more: http://www.wholesomewords.org/missions/ilivingstone.html

How not to / How to present the Gospel

2009-08-07T00:21:00.001+02:00

Chesterton, Heretics, 10

2009-08-06T00:26:00.001+02:00

On Sandals and Simplicity

The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not);it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them. A Frenchman can be proud of being bold and logical, and still remain bold and logical.A German can be proud of being reflective and orderly, and still remain reflective and orderly. But an Englishman cannot be proud of being simple and direct, and still remain simple and direct.In the matter of these strange virtues, to know them is to kill them.A man may be conscious of being heroic or conscious of being divine,but he cannot (in spite of all the Anglo-Saxon poets) be conscious of being unconscious.

Now, I do not think that it can be honestly denied that some portion of this impossibility attaches to a class very different in their own opinion, at least, to the school of Anglo-Saxonism. I mean that school of the simple life, commonly associated with Tolstoy.If a perpetual talk about one's own robustness leads to being less robust, it is even more true that a perpetual talking about one's own simplicity leads to being less simple.One great complaint, I think, must stand against the modern upholders of the simple life--the simple life in all its varied forms,from vegetarianism to the honourable consistency of the Doukhobors. This complaint against them stands, that they would make us simple in the unimportant things, but complex in the important things.They would make us simple in the things that do not matter--that is, in diet, in costume, in etiquette, in economic system.But they would make us complex in the things that do matter--in philosophy,in loyalty, in spiritual acceptance, and spiritual rejection.It does not so very much matter whether a man eats a grilled tomato or a plain tomato; it does very much matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a grilled mind. The only kind of simplicity worth preserving is the simplicity of the heart, the simplicity which accepts and enjoys.There may be a reasonable doubt as to what system preserves this;there can surely be no doubt that a system of simplicity destroys it.There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.The chief error of these people is to be found in the very phrase to which they are most attached--"plain living and high thinking."These people do not stand in need of, will not be improved by,plain living and high thinking. They stand in need of the contrary.They would be improved by high living and plain thinking.A little high living (I say, having a full sense of responsibility,a little high living) would teach them the force and meaning of the human festivities, of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the world. It would teach them the historic fact that the artificial is, if anything, older than the natural.It would teach them that the loving-cup is as old as any hunger.It would teach them that ritualism is older than any religion.And a little plain thinking would teach them how harsh and fancifulare the mass of their own ethics, how very civilized and very complicated must be the brain of the Tolstoyan who really believes it to be evil to love one's country and wicked to strike a blow.

A man approaches, wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held firmly in his right hand, and says, "The affections of family and country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love;" but the plain thinker will only answer him,with a wonder not untinged with admiration, "What a great deal of trouble you must have taken in order to feel like that."High living will reject the tomato. Plain thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable sinfulness of war.High living will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material. And plain thinkingwill convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to reserve our horror chiefly for material wounds.

The only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart.If that be gone, it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular clothing;but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not quenched.If that remain, it matters very little if a few Early Victorianarmchairs remain along with it. Let us put a complex entree intoa simple old gentleman; let us not put a simple entree into a complexold gentleman. So long as human society will leave my spiritualinside alone, I will allow it, with a comparative submission, to workits wild will with my physical interior. I will submit to cigars.I will meekly embrace a bottle of Burgundy. I will humble myselfto a hansom cab. If only by this means I may preserve to myselfthe virginity of the spirit, which enjoys with astonishment and fear.I do not say that these are the only methods of preserving it.I incline to the belief that there are others. But I will havenothing to do with simplicity which lacks the fear, the astonishment,and the joy alike. I will have nothing to do with the devilishvision of a child who is too simple to like toys.

The child is, indeed, in these, and many other matters, the best guide.And in nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothingdoes he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity,than in the fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure,even the complex things. The false type of naturalness harpsalways on the distinction between the natural and the artificial.The higher kind of naturalness ignores that distinction.To the child the tree and the lamp-post are as natural and asartificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are naturalbut both supernatural. For both are splendid and unexplained.The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame with whichSam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the goldof fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most rusticchild is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only spiritualor philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men payfor them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that menare killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them.The evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain.The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that theyare not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical,but that men are mechanical.

In this matter, then, as in all the other matters treated in this book,our main conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view,a philosophy or religion which is needed, and not any change in habitor social routine. The things we need most for immediate practicalpurposes are all abstractions. We need a right view of the human lot,a right view of the human society; and if we were living eagerlyand angrily in the enthusiasm of those things, we should,ipso facto, be living simply in the genuine and spiritual sense.Desire and danger make every one simple. And to those who talk to uswith interfering eloquence about Jaeger and the pores of the skin,and about Plasmon and the coats of the stomach, at them shall onlybe hurled the words that are hurled at fops and gluttons, "Take nothought what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal yeshall be clothed. For after all these things do the Gentiles seek.But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,and all these things shall be added unto you." Those amazingwords are not only extraordinarily good, practical politics;they are also superlatively good hygiene. The one supreme wayof making all those processes go right, the processes of health,and strength, and grace, and beauty, the one and only way of makingcertain of their accuracy, is to think about something else.If a man is bent on climbing into the seventh heaven, he may bequite easy about the pores of his skin. If he harnesses his waggonto a star, the process will have a most satisfactory effect uponthe coats of his stomach. For the thing called "taking thought,"the thing for which the best modern word is "rationalizing,"is in its nature, inapplicable to all plain and urgent things.Men take thought and ponder rationalistically, touching remote things--things that only theoretically matter, such as the transit of Venus.But only at their peril can men rationalize about so practicala matter as health.

Chesterton, Heretics, 9

2009-08-05T00:25:00.001+02:00

The Moods of Mr. George Moore

Mr. George Moore began his literary career by writing his personal confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them for the remainder of his life. He is a man of genuinely forcible mind and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction which excites and pleases.He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty. He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until they could stand it no longer. Everything he writes, it is to be fully admitted,has a genuine mental power. His account of his reason for leaving the Roman Catholic Church is possibly the most admirable tribute to that communion which has been written of late years.For the fact of the matter is, that the weakness which has rendered barren the many brilliancies of Mr. Moore is actually that weakness which the Roman Catholic Church is at its best in combating.Mr. Moore hates Catholicism because it breaks up the house of looking-glasses in which he lives. Mr. Moore does not dislike so much being asked to believe in the spiritual existence of miracles or sacraments, but he does fundamentally dislike being asked to believe in the actual existence of other people.Like his master Pater and all the aesthetes, his real quarrel with life is that it is not a dream that can be moulded by the dreamer.It is not the dogma of the reality of the other world that troubles him,but the dogma of the reality of this world.

The truth is that the tradition of Christianity (which is still the only coherent ethic of Europe) rests on two or three paradoxes or mysteries which can easily be impugned in argument and as easily justified in life.One of them, for instance, is the paradox of hope or faith--that the more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be the man.Stevenson understood this, and consequently Mr. Moore cannot understand Stevenson. Another is the paradox of charity or chivalry that the weaker a thing is the more it should be respected,that the more indefensible a thing is the more it should appeal to us for a certain kind of defence. Thackeray understood this,and therefore Mr. Moore does not understand Thackeray. Now, one of these very practical and working mysteries in the Christian tradition,and one which the Roman Catholic Church, as I say, has done her best work in singling out, is the conception of the sinfulness of pride.Pride is a weakness in the character; it dries up laughter,it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy.The Christian tradition understands this; therefore Mr. Moore does not understand the Christian tradition.

For the truth is much stranger even than it appears in the formal doctrine of the sin of pride. It is not only true that humility is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride.It is also true that vanity is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride. Vanity is social--it is almost a kind of comradeship;pride is solitary and uncivilized. Vanity is active;it desires the applause of infinite multitudes; pride is passive,desiring only the applause of one person, which it already has.Vanity is humorous, and can enjoy the joke even of itself;pride is dull, and cannot even smile. And the whole of this difference is the difference between Stevenson and Mr. George Moore,who, as he informs us, has "brushed Stevenson aside." I do not know where he has been brushed to, but wherever it is I fancy he is having a good time, because he had the wisdom to be vain, and not proud.Stevenson had a windy vanity; Mr. Moore has a dusty egoism.Hence Stevenson could amuse himself as well as us with his vanity;while the richest effects of Mr. Moore's absurdity are hidden from his eyes.

If we compare this solemn folly with the happy folly with which Stevenson belauds his own books and berates his own critics,we shall not find it difficult to guess why it is that Stevenson at least found a final philosophy of some sort to live by,while Mr. Moore is always walking the world looking for a new one.Stevenson had found that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility.Self is the gorgon. Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives. Pride studies it for itself and is turned to stone.

It is necessary to dwell on this defect in Mr. Moore, because itis really the weakness of work which is not without its strength. Mr. Moore's egoism is not merely a moral weakness, it is a very constant and influential aesthetic weakness as well.We should really be much more interested in Mr. Moore if he werenot quite so interested in himself. We feel as if we were being shown through a gallery of really fine pictures, into each of which,by some useless and discordant convention, the artist had represented the same figure in the same attitude. "The Grand Canal with a distant view of Mr. Moore," "Effect of Mr. Moore through a Scotch Mist,""Mr. Moore by Firelight," "Ruins of Mr. Moore by Moonlight,"and so on, seems to be the endless series. He would no doubt reply that in such a book as this he intended to reveal himself.But the answer is that in such a book as this he does not succeed.One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys self-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism.Thinking about himself will lead to trying to be the universe;trying to be the universe will lead to ceasing to be anything.If, on the other hand, a man is sensible enough to think only about the universe; he will think about it in his own individual way.He will keep virgin the secret of God; he will see the grass as no other man can see it, and look at a sun that no man has ever known.This fact is very practically brought out in Mr. Moore's "Confessions."In reading them we do not feel the presence of a clean-cut personality like that of Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.We only read a number of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions which might be uttered by any clever person, but which we are calledupon to admire specifically, because they are uttered by Mr. Moore.He is the only thread that connects Catholicism and Protestantism,realism and mysticism--he or rather his name. He is profoundly absorbed even in views he no longer holds, and he expects us to be.And he intrudes the capital "I" even where it need not be intruded--even where it weakens the force of a plain statement.Where another man would say, "It is a fine day," Mr. Moore says,"Seen through my temperament, the day appeared fine."Where another man would say "Milton has obviously a fine style,"Mr. Moore would say, "As a stylist Milton had always impressed me."The Nemesis of this self-centred spirit is that of being totally ineffectual. Mr. Moore has started many interesting crusades,but he has abandoned them before his disciples could begin.Even when he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as the children of falsehood. Even when he has found reality he cannot find rest.One Irish quality he has which no Irishman was ever without--pugnacity;and that is certainly a great virtue, especially in the present age.But he has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting spirit in a man like Bernard Shaw. His weakness of introspection and selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting;but they will always prevent him winning.

Chesterton, Heretics, 8

2009-08-04T00:24:00.000+02:00

The Mildness of the Yellow Press

There is a great deal of protest made from one quarter or anothernowadays against the influence of that new journalism which isassociated with the names of Sir Alfred Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson.But almost everybody who attacks it attacks on the ground that itis very sensational, very violent and vulgar and startling.I am speaking in no affected contrariety, but in the simplicityof a genuine personal impression, when I say that this journalismoffends as being not sensational or violent enough. The real viceis not that it is startling, but that it is quite insupportably tame.The whole object is to keep carefully along a certain level of theexpected and the commonplace; it may be low, but it must take carealso to be flat. Never by any chance in it is there any of that realplebeian pungency which can be heard from the ordinary cabman inthe ordinary street. We have heard of a certain standard of decorumwhich demands that things should be funny without being vulgar,but the standard of this decorum demands that if things are vulgarthey shall be vulgar without being funny. This journalism doesnot merely fail to exaggerate life--it positively underrates it;and it has to do so because it is intended for the faint and languidrecreation of men whom the fierceness of modern life has fatigued.This press is not the yellow press at all; it is the drab press.Sir Alfred Harmsworth must not address to the tired clerkany observation more witty than the tired clerk might be ableto address to Sir Alfred Harmsworth. It must not expose anybody(anybody who is powerful, that is), it must not offend anybody,it must not even please anybody, too much. A general vague ideathat in spite of all this, our yellow press is sensational,arises from such external accidents as large type or lurid headlines.It is quite true that these editors print everything they possiblycan in large capital letters. But they do this, not because itis startling, but because it is soothing. To people wholly wearyor partly drunk in a dimly lighted train, it is a simplification anda comfort to have things presented in this vast and obvious manner.The editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers,for exactly the same reason that parents and governesses usea similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell.The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as a horseshoein order to make the child jump; on the contrary, they use it to putthe child at his ease, to make things smoother and more evident.Of the same character is the dim and quiet dame school whichSir Alfred Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson keep. All their sentimentsare spelling-book sentiments--that is to say, they are sentimentswith which the pupil is already respectfully familiar.All their wildest posters are leaves torn from a copy-book.

Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France,in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country.When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill,he creates a thrill worth talking about. He denounces a leadingIrish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police systemwith a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalistdesires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say,that the President of the Republic has murdered three wives.Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this;their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same.But it is their mental calibre which happens to be suchthat they can only invent calm and even reassuring things.The fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Pekinwas mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those whohad private reasons for terror or sorrow. It was not connectedwith any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation.It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressiveexcept a great deal of blood. Real sensationalism, of which Ihappen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral.But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage.For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinelyto surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump,you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you.But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage;their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis,the things which everybody else says casually, and without rememberingwhat they have said. When they brace themselves up to attack anything,they never reach the point of attacking anything which is largeand real, and would resound with the shock. They do not attackthe army as men do in France, or the judges as men do in Ireland,or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago.They attack something like the War Office--something, that is,which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend,something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers.just as a man shows he has a weak voice by straining itto shout, so they show the hopelessly unsensational natureof their minds when they really try to be sensational.With the whole world full of big and dubious institutions,with the whole wickedness of civilization staring them in the face,their idea of being bold and bright is to attack the War Office.They might as well start a campaign against the weather, or forma secret society in order to make jokes about mothers-in-law. Nor is itonly from the point of view of particular amateurs of the sensationalsuch as myself, that it is permissible to say, in the words ofCowper's Alexander Selkirk, that "their tameness is shocking to me."The whole modern world is pining for a genuinely sensational journalism.This has been discovered by that very able and honest journalist,Mr. Blatchford, who started his campaign against Christianity,warned on all sides, I believe, that it would ruin his paper, but whocontinued from an honourable sense of intellectual responsibility.He discovered, however, that while he had undoubtedly shockedhis readers, he had also greatly advanced his newspaper.It was bought--first, by all the people who agreed with him and wantedto read it; and secondly, by all the people who disagreed with him,and wanted to write him letters. Those letters were voluminous (I helped,I am glad to say, to swell their volume), and they were generallyinserted with a generous fulness. Thus was accidentally discovered(like the steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim--that if aneditor can only make people angry enough, they will write halfhis newspaper for him for nothing.

Some hold that such papers as these are scarcely the properobjects of so serious a consideration; but that can scarcelybe maintained from a political or ethical point of view.In this problem of the mildness and tameness of the Harmsworth mindthere is mirrored the outlines of a much larger problem which isakin to it.

The Harmsworthian journalist begins with a worship of successand violence, and ends in sheer timidity and mediocrity.But he is not alone in this, nor does he come by this fate merelybecause he happens personally to be stupid. Every man, however brave,who begins by worshipping violence, must end in mere timidity.Every man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success, must endin mere mediocrity. This strange and paradoxical fate is involved,not in the individual, but in the philosophy, in the point of view.It is not the folly of the man which brings about thisnecessary fall; it is his wisdom. The worship of success isthe only one out of all possible worships of which this is true,that its followers are foredoomed to become slaves and cowards.A man may be a hero for the sake of Mrs. Gallup's ciphers or forthe sake of human sacrifice, but not for the sake of success.For obviously a man may choose to fail because he lovesMrs. Gallup or human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to failbecause he loves success. When the test of triumph is men's testof everything, they never endure long enough to triumph at all.As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flatteryor platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hopebegins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues,it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.

It was through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all thesemodern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and acquiescence.They desired strength; and to them to desire strength was toadmire strength; to admire strength was simply to admire the statu quo.They thought that he who wished to be strong ought to respect the strong.They did not realize the obvious verity that he who wishes to bestrong must despise the strong. They sought to be everything,to have the whole force of the cosmos behind them, to have an energythat would drive the stars. But they did not realize the twogreat facts--first, that in the attempt to be everything the firstand most difficult step is to be something; second, that the momenta man is something, he is essentially defying everything.The lower animals, say the men of science, fought their way upwith a blind selfishness. If this be so, the only real moral of itis that our unselfishness, if it is to triumph, must be equally blind.The mammoth did not put his head on one side and wonder whethermammoths were a little out of date. Mammoths were at leastas much up to date as that individual mammoth could make them.The great elk did not say, "Cloven hoofs are very much worn now."He polished his own weapons for his own use. But in the reasoninganimal there has arisen a more horrible danger, that he may failthrough perceiving his own failure. When modern sociologists talkof the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time,they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirelyof people who will not accommodate themselves to anything.At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creaturesall accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there.And that is becoming more and more the situation of modern England.Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion,public opinion minus his opinion. Every man makes hiscontribution negative under the erroneous impression thatthe next man's contribution is positive. Every man surrendershis fancy to a general tone which is itself a surrender.And over all the heartless and fatuous unity spreads this newand wearisome and platitudinous press, incapable of invention,incapable of audacity, capable only of a servility all the morecontemptible because it is not even a servility to the strong.But all who begin with force and conquest will end in this.

The chief characteristic of the "New journalism" is simply that itis bad journalism. It is beyond all comparison the most shapeless,careless, and colourless work done in our day.

I read yesterday a sentence which should be written in letters of goldand adamant; it is the very motto of the new philosophy of Empire.I found it (as the reader has already eagerly guessed) in Pearson'sMagazine, while I was communing (soul to soul) with Mr. C. Arthur Pearson,whose first and suppressed name I am afraid is Chilperic.It occurred in an article on the American Presidential Election.This is the sentence, and every one should read it carefully,and roll it on the tongue, till all the honey be tasted.

"A little sound common sense often goes further with an audience of American working-men than much high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential Election."

I do not wish to soil this perfect thing with comment;the words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.But just think for a moment of the mind, the strange inscrutable mind,of the man who wrote that, of the editor who approved it,of the people who are probably impressed by it, of the incredibleAmerican working-man, of whom, for all I know, it may be true.Think what their notion of "common sense" must be! It is delightfulto realize that you and I are now able to win thousands of votesshould we ever be engaged in a Presidential Election, by doing somethingof this kind. For I suppose the nails and the board are not essentialto the exhibition of "common sense;" there may be variations.We may read--

"A little common sense impresses American working-men more than high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he made his points, pulled buttons off his waistcoat, won thousands of votes for his side." Or, "Sound common sense tells better in America than high-flown argument. Thus Senator Budge, who threw his false teeth in the air every time he made an epigram, won the solid approval of American working-men." Or again, "The sound common sense of a gentleman from Earlswood, who stuck straws in his hair during the progress of his speech, assured the victory of Mr. Roosevelt."

There are many other elements in this article on which I shouldlove to linger. But the matter which I wish to point out is thatin that sentence is perfectly revealed the whole truth of whatour Chamberlainites, hustlers, bustlers, Empire-builders, and strong,silent men, really mean by "commonsense." They mean knocking,with deafening noise and dramatic effect, meaningless bitsof iron into a useless bit of wood. A man goes on to an Americanplatform and behaves like a mountebank fool with a board anda hammer; well, I do not blame him; I might even admire him.He may be a dashing and quite decent strategist. He may be a fineromantic actor, like Burke flinging the dagger on the floor.He may even (for all I know) be a sublime mystic, profoundly impressedwith the ancient meaning of the divine trade of the Carpenter,and offering to the people a parable in the form of a ceremony.All I wish to indicate is the abyss of mental confusion inwhich such wild ritualism can be called "sound common sense."And it is in that abyss of mental confusion, and in that alone,that the new Imperialism lives and moves and has its being.The whole glory and greatness of Mr. Chamberlain consists in this:that if a man hits the right nail on the head nobody cares where he hitsit to or what it does. They care about the noise of the hammer, not aboutthe silent drip of the nail. Before and throughout the African war,Mr. Chamberlain was always knocking in nails, with ringing decisiveness.But when we ask, "But what have these nails held together?Where is your carpentry? Where are your contented Outlanders?Where is your free South Africa? Where is your British prestige?What have your nails done?" then what answer is there?We must go back (with an affectionate sigh) to our Pearsonfor the answer to the question of what the nails have done:"The speaker who hammered nails into a board won thousands of votes."

Now the whole of this passage is admirably characteristic of the newjournalism which Mr. Pearson represents, the new journalism which hasjust purchased the Standard. To take one instance out of hundreds,the incomparable man with the board and nails is described in the Pearson'sarticle as calling out (as he smote the symbolic nail), "Lie number one.Nailed to the Mast! Nailed to the Mast!" In the whole office therewas apparently no compositor or office-boy to point out that wespeak of lies being nailed to the counter, and not to the mast.Nobody in the office knew that Pearson's Magazine was fallinginto a stale Irish bull, which must be as old as St. Patrick.This is the real and essential tragedy of the sale of the Standard.It is not merely that journalism is victorious over literature.It is that bad journalism is victorious over good journalism.

It is not that one article which we consider costly and beautiful is beingousted by another kind of article which we consider common or unclean.It is that of the same article a worse quality is preferred to a better.If you like popular journalism (as I do), you will know that Pearson'sMagazine is poor and weak popular journalism. You will know itas certainly as you know bad butter. You will know as certainlythat it is poor popular journalism as you know that the Strand,in the great days of Sherlock Holmes, was good popular journalism.Mr. Pearson has been a monument of this enormous banality.About everything he says and does there is something infinitelyweak-minded. He clamours for home trades and employs foreignones to print his paper. When this glaring fact is pointed out,he does not say that the thing was an oversight, like a sane man.He cuts it off with scissors, like a child of three. His very cunningis infantile. And like a child of three, he does not cut it quite off.In all human records I doubt if there is such an example of a profoundsimplicity in deception. This is the sort of intelligence which nowsits in the seat of the sane and honourable old Tory journalism.If it were really the triumph of the tropical exuberance of theYankee press, it would be vulgar, but still tropical. But it is not.We are delivered over to the bramble, and from the meanest ofthe shrubs comes the fire upon the cedars of Lebanon.

The only question now is how much longer the fiction will endurethat journalists of this order represent public opinion.It may be doubted whether any honest and serious Tariff Reformerwould for a moment maintain that there was any majorityfor Tariff Reform in the country comparable to the ludicrouspreponderance which money has given it among the great dailies.The only inference is that for purposes of real public opinionthe press is now a mere plutocratic oligarchy. Doubtless thepublic buys the wares of these men, for one reason or another.But there is no more reason to suppose that the public admirestheir politics than that the public admires the delicate philosophyof Mr. Crosse or the darker and sterner creed of Mr. Blackwell.If these men are merely tradesmen, there is nothing to say exceptthat there are plenty like them in the Battersea Park Road,and many much better. But if they make any sort of attemptto be politicians, we can only point out to them that they are notas yet even good journalists.

Chesterton, Heretics, 7

2009-08-03T00:23:00.000+02:00

Omar and the Sacred Vine

A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connectionwith the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matterrange from the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the ladywho smashes American bars with an axe. In these discussions itis almost always felt that one very wise and moderate position isto say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine.With this I should venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity.The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drinkit as a medicine. And for this reason, If a man drinks wine in orderto obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional,something he does not expect every hour of the day, something which,unless he is a little insane, he will not try to get every hourof the day. But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health,he is trying to get something natural; something, that is,that he ought not to be without; something that he may find itdifficult to reconcile himself to being without. The man may notbe seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is moredazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary.If there were a magic ointment, and we took it to a strong man,and said, "This will enable you to jump off the Monument,"doubtless he would jump off the Monument, but he would not jumpoff the Monument all day long to the delight of the City.But if we took it to a blind man, saying, "This will enable you to see,"he would be under a heavier temptation. It would be hard for himnot to rub it on his eyes whenever he heard the hoof of a noblehorse or the birds singing at daybreak. It is easy to deny one'sself festivity; it is difficult to deny one's self normality.Hence comes the fact which every doctor knows, that it is oftenperilous to give alcohol to the sick even when they need it.I need hardly say that I do not mean that I think the givingof alcohol to the sick for stimulus is necessarily unjustifiable.But I do mean that giving it to the healthy for fun is the properuse of it, and a great deal more consistent with health.

The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many othersound rules--a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never becauseyou are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it,or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum;but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be likethe laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it,for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell.But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking,and the ancient health of the world.

For more than thirty years the shadow and glory of a greatEastern figure has lain upon our English literature.Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam concentrated into animmortal poignancy all the dark and drifting hedonism of our time.Of the literary splendour of that work it would be merely banal to speak;in few other of the books of men has there been anything so combiningthe gay pugnacity of an epigram with the vague sadness of a song.But of its philosophical, ethical, and religious influence which hasbeen almost as great as its brilliancy, I should like to say a word,and that word, I confess, one of uncompromising hostility.There are a great many things which might be said againstthe spirit of the Rubaiyat, and against its prodigious influence.But one matter of indictment towers ominously above the rest--a genuine disgrace to it, a genuine calamity to us. This is the terribleblow that this great poem has struck against sociability and the joyof life. Some one called Omar "the sad, glad old Persian."Sad he is; glad he is not, in any sense of the word whatever.He has been a worse foe to gladness than the Puritans.

A pensive and graceful Oriental lies under the rose-treewith his wine-pot and his scroll of poems. It may seem strangethat any one's thoughts should, at the moment of regarding him,fly back to the dark bedside where the doctor doles out brandy.It may seem stranger still that they should go backto the grey wastrel shaking with gin in Houndsditch.But a great philosophical unity links the three in an evil bond.Omar Khayyam's wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is wine-bibbing.It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical wine-bibbing. Itis the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not happy.His is the wine that shuts out the universe, not the wine that reveals it.It is not poetical drinking, which is joyous and instinctive;it is rational drinking, which is as prosaic as an investment,as unsavoury as a dose of camomile. Whole heavens above it,from the point of view of sentiment, though not of style,rises the splendour of some old English drinking-song--

"Then pass the bowl, my comrades all, And let the zider vlow."
For this song was caught up by happy men to express the worthof truly worthy things, of brotherhood and garrulity, and the briefand kindly leisure of the poor. Of course, the great part ofthe more stolid reproaches directed against the Omarite moralityare as false and babyish as such reproaches usually are. One critic,whose work I have read, had the incredible foolishness to call Omaran atheist and a materialist. It is almost impossible for an Orientalto be either; the East understands metaphysics too well for that.Of course, the real objection which a philosophical Christianwould bring against the religion of Omar, is not that he givesno place to God, it is that he gives too much place to God.His is that terrible theism which can imagine nothing else but deity,and which denies altogether the outlines of human personalityand human will.

"The ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes, But Here or There as strikes the Player goes; And He that tossed you down into the field, He knows about it all--he knows--he knows."
A Christian thinker such as Augustine or Dante would object to thisbecause it ignores free-will, which is the valour and dignity of the soul.The quarrel of the highest Christianity with this scepticism isnot in the least that the scepticism denies the existence of God;it is that it denies the existence of man.

In this cult of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker the Rubaiyatstands first in our time; but it does not stand alone.Many of the most brilliant intellects of our time have urgedus to the same self-conscious snatching at a rare delight.Walter Pater said that we were all under sentence of death,and the only course was to enjoy exquisite moments simplyfor those moments' sake. The same lesson was taught by thevery powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde.It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion isnot the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people.Great joy does, not gather the rosebuds while it may;its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendourof youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in.In all great comic literature, in "Tristram Shandy"or "Pickwick", there is this sense of space and incorruptibility;we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale.

It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chieflyin certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should thinkof them as passing, or enjoy them simply "for those moments' sake."To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it.Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure.I do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I meansomething with a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness.A man may have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love,or a moment of victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment,but precisely not for the moment's sake. He enjoys it for thewoman's sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but notfor the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag.The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting;the love may be calf-love, and last a week. But the patriot thinksof the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as somethingthat cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity;these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary.Once look at them as moments after Pater's manner, and they becomeas cold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things.He can only love immortal things for an instant.

Pater's mistake is revealed in his most famous phrase.He asks us to burn with a hard, gem-like flame. Flames are neverhard and never gem-like--they cannot be handled or arranged.So human emotions are never hard and never gem-like; they arealways dangerous, like flames, to touch or even to examine.There is only one way in which our passions can become hardand gem-like, and that is by becoming as cold as gems.No blow then has ever been struck at the natural loves and laughterof men so sterilizing as this carpe diem of the aesthetes.For any kind of pleasure a totally different spirit is required;a certain shyness, a certain indeterminate hope, a certainboyish expectation. Purity and simplicity are essential to passions--yes even to evil passions. Even vice demands a sort of virginity.

Omar's (or Fitzgerald's) effect upon the other world we may let go,his hand upon this world has been heavy and paralyzing.The Puritans, as I have said, are far jollier than he.The new ascetics who follow Thoreau or Tolstoy are much livelier company;for, though the surrender of strong drink and such luxuries maystrike us as an idle negation, it may leave a man with innumerablenatural pleasures, and, above all, with man's natural power of happiness.Thoreau could enjoy the sunrise without a cup of coffee. If Tolstoycannot admire marriage, at least he is healthy enough to admire mud.Nature can be enjoyed without even the most natural luxuries.A good bush needs no wine. But neither nature nor wine nor anythingelse can be enjoyed if we have the wrong attitude towards happiness,and Omar (or Fitzgerald) did have the wrong attitude towards happiness.He and those he has influenced do not see that if we are to be truly gay,we must believe that there is some eternal gaiety in the nature of things.We cannot enjoy thoroughly even a pas-de-quatre at a subscription danceunless we believe that the stars are dancing to the same tune. No one canbe really hilarious but the serious man. "Wine," says the Scripture,"maketh glad the heart of man," but only of the man who has a heart.The thing called high spirits is possible only to the spiritual.Ultimately a man cannot rejoice in anything except the nature of things.Ultimately a man can enjoy nothing except religion. Once in the world'shistory men did believe that the stars were dancing to the tuneof their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since.With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat hasquite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety.He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his churchwas grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman.Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament.Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament.But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feastsbecause life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad."Drink," he says, "for you know not whence you come nor why.Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because thestars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink,because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for.Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and anevil peace." So he stands offering us the cup in his hand.And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whosehand also is the cup of the vine. "Drink" he says "for the wholeworld is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrathof God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and thisis the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new testamentthat is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why.Drink, for I know of when you go and where."

Chesterton, Heretics, 6

2009-08-02T00:23:00.000+02:00

Christmas and the Aesthetes

The world is round, so round that the schools of optimism and pessimismhave been arguing from the beginning whether it is the right way up.The difficulty does not arise so much from the mere fact that good andevil are mingled in roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly fromthe fact that men always differ about what parts are good and what evil.Hence the difficulty which besets "undenominational religions."They profess to include what is beautiful in all creeds, but theyappear to many to have collected all that is dull in them.All the colours mixed together in purity ought to make a perfect white.Mixed together on any human paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and athing very like many new religions. Such a blend is often something muchworse than any one creed taken separately, even the creed of the Thugs.The error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is reallythe good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion.And this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who havethe misfortune to think of some religion or other, that the partscommonly counted good are bad, and the parts commonly countedbad are good.

It is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group, but to admireit in a photographic negative. It is difficult to congratulate alltheir whites on being black and all their blacks on their whiteness.This will often happen to us in connection with human religions.Take two institutions which bear witness to the religious energyof the nineteenth century. Take the Salvation Army and the philosophyof Auguste Comte.

The usual verdict of educated people on the Salvation Army isexpressed in some such words as these: "I have no doubt they doa great deal of good, but they do it in a vulgar and profane style;their aims are excellent, but their methods are wrong."To me, unfortunately, the precise reverse of this appears to bethe truth. I do not know whether the aims of the Salvation Armyare excellent, but I am quite sure their methods are admirable.Their methods are the methods of all intense and hearty religions;they are popular like all religion, military like all religion,public and sensational like all religion. They are not reverent any morethan Roman Catholics are reverent, for reverence in the sad and delicatemeaning of the term reverence is a thing only possible to infidels.That beautiful twilight you will find in Euripides, in Renan,in Matthew Arnold; but in men who believe you will not find it--you will find only laughter and war. A man cannot pay that kindof reverence to truth solid as marble; they can only be reverenttowards a beautiful lie. And the Salvation Army, though their voicehas broken out in a mean environment and an ugly shape, are reallythe old voice of glad and angry faith, hot as the riots of Dionysus,wild as the gargoyles of Catholicism, not to be mistaken for a philosophy.Professor Huxley, in one of his clever phrases, called the SalvationArmy "corybantic Christianity." Huxley was the last and noblestof those Stoics who have never understood the Cross. If he hadunderstood Christianity he would have known that there never has been,and never can be, any Christianity that is not corybantic.

And there is this difference between the matter of aims andthe matter of methods, that to judge of the aims of a thing likethe Salvation Army is very difficult, to judge of their ritualand atmosphere very easy. No one, perhaps, but a sociologistcan see whether General Booth's housing scheme is right.But any healthy person can see that banging brass cymbals togethermust be right. A page of statistics, a plan of model dwellings,anything which is rational, is always difficult for the lay mind.But the thing which is irrational any one can understand.That is why religion came so early into the world and spread so far,while science came so late into the world and has not spread at all.History unanimously attests the fact that it is only mysticismwhich stands the smallest chance of being understanded of the people.Common sense has to be kept as an esoteric secret in the dark templeof culture. And so while the philanthropy of the Salvationists and itsgenuineness may be a reasonable matter for the discussion of the doctors,there can be no doubt about the genuineness of their brass bands,for a brass band is purely spiritual, and seeks only to quickenthe internal life. The object of philanthropy is to do good;the object of religion is to be good, if only for a moment,amid a crash of brass.

And the same antithesis exists about another modern religion--I meanthe religion of Comte, generally known as Positivism, or the worshipof humanity. Such men as Mr. Frederic Harrison, that brilliantand chivalrous philosopher, who still, by his mere personality,speaks for the creed, would tell us that he offers us the philosophyof Comte, but not all Comte's fantastic proposals for pontiffsand ceremonials, the new calendar, the new holidays and saints' days.He does not mean that we should dress ourselves up as priestsof humanity or let off fireworks because it is Milton's birthday.To the solid English Comtist all this appears, he confesses, to bea little absurd. To me it appears the only sensible part of Comtism.As a philosophy it is unsatisfactory. It is evidently impossible toworship humanity, just as it is impossible to worship the Savile Club;both are excellent institutions to which we may happen to belong.But we perceive clearly that the Savile Club did not make the starsand does not fill the universe. And it is surely unreasonable to attackthe doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism,and then to ask men to worship a being who is ninety million personsin one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

But if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient, the folly of Comtewas wisdom. In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thoughtof as something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible,he alone saw that men must always have the sacredness of mummery.He saw that while the brutes have all the useful things, the thingsthat are truly human are the useless ones. He saw the falsehoodof that almost universal notion of to-day, the notion that ritesand forms are something artificial, additional, and corrupt.Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and muchwilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things doesnot only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say;it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do.The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples,and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearinggreen carnations and burning other philosophers alive.But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn,and man was a ritualist before he could speak. If Comtism had spreadthe world would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy,but by the Comtist calendar. By discouraging what they conceiveto be the weakness of their master, the English Positivistshave broken the strength of their religion. A man who has faithmust be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictionswhen he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them.I myself, to take a corpus vile, am very certain that I would notread the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever.But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lightinga bonfire on Darwin Day.

That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has succeeded.There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy.Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavilybombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently andbrilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy.Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and againover the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set upa single new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment to rally to.They have not given a name or a new occasion of gaiety.Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthdayof Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptiveof the infancy of Ibsen outside people's doors in the snow.In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remainsout of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth.Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian,when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it.In all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.

The strange truth about the matter is told in the very word "holiday."A bank holiday means presumably a day which bankers regard as holy.A half-holiday means, I suppose, a day on which a schoolboy is onlypartially holy. It is hard to see at first sight why so human a thingas leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin.Rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and giveeach other presents in honour of anything--the birth of MichaelAngelo or the opening of Euston Station. But it does not work.As a fact, men only become greedily and gloriously material aboutsomething spiritualistic. Take away the Nicene Creed and similar things,and you do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages.Take away the strange beauty of the saints, and what hasremained to us is the far stranger ugliness of Wandsworth.Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.

And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter. There are in the modernworld an admirable class of persons who really make protest on behalfof that antiqua pulchritudo of which Augustine spoke, who do longfor the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.William Morris and his followers showed how much brighter werethe dark ages than the age of Manchester. Mr. W. B. Yeats frameshis steps in prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voiceto forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear. Mr. George Moorecollects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulnessof the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved.There are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garmentswho pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian games.But there is about these people a haunting and alarming somethingwhich suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas.It is painful to regard human nature in such a light,but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore doesnot wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight.It is even possible that Mr. W. B. Yeats never pulls crackers.If so, where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions?Here is a solid and ancient festive tradition still plyinga roaring trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar.if this is so, let them be very certain of this, that they arethe kind of people who in the time of the maypole would have thoughtthe maypole vulgar; who in the time of the Canterbury pilgrimagewould have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the timeof the Olympian games would have thought the Olympian games vulgar.Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that they were vulgar.Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean coarseness of speech,rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and some heavy drinking,vulgarity there always was wherever there was joy, wherever there wasfaith in the gods. Wherever you have belief you will have hilarity,wherever you have hilarity you will have some dangers. And as creedand mythology produce this gross and vigorous life, so in its turnthis gross and vigorous life will always produce creed and mythology.If we ever get the English back on to the English land they will becomeagain a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people.The absence from modern life of both the higher and lower forms of faithis largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds.If we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of turnips.

Chesterton, Heretics, 5

2009-08-01T00:22:00.000+02:00

Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real partof a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display,but the virtues that he cannot. And the more we approach the problemsof human history with this keen and piercing charity, the smallerand smaller space we shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind.The hypocrites shall not deceive us into thinking them saints;but neither shall they deceive us into thinking them hypocrites.And an increasing number of cases will crowd into our field of inquiry,cases in which there is really no question of hypocrisy at all,cases in which people were so ingenuous that they seemed absurd,and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous.

There is one striking instance of an unfair charge of hypocrisy.It is always urged against the religious in the past, as a point ofinconsistency and duplicity, that they combined a profession of almostcrawling humility with a keen struggle for earthly success and considerabletriumph in attaining it. It is felt as a piece of humbug, that a manshould be very punctilious in calling himself a miserable sinner,and also very punctilious in calling himself King of France.But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency betweenthe humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than thereis between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover.The truth is that there are no things for which men will make suchherculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strainedevery nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire.And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he oughtnot to have it. The whole secret of the practical success of Christendomlies in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled.For with the removal of all question of merit or payment, the soulis suddenly released for incredible voyages. If we ask a sane manhow much he merits, his mind shrinks instinctively and instantaneously.It is doubtful whether he merits six feet of earth.But if you ask him what he can conquer--he can conquer the stars.Thus comes the thing called Romance, a purely Christian product.A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.The mediaeval Europe which asserted humility gained Romance;the civilization which gained Romance has gained the habitable globe.How different the Pagan and Stoical feeling was from this hasbeen admirably expressed in a famous quotation. Addison makesthe great Stoic say--

"'Tis not in mortals to command success; But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it."
But the spirit of Romance and Christendom, the spirit which is inevery lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with Europeanadventure, is quite opposite. 'Tis not in mortals to deserve success.But we'll do more, Sempronius; we'll obtain it.

And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet readyfor an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that everyone has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and mysterious.Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be a vice.Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride.It is mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goeswith a certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity.Humility will always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold;pride is that which refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or pleaseit too much. In a word, the failure of this virtue actually liesin its success; it is too successful as an investment to be believedin as a virtue. Humility is not merely too good for this world;it is too practical for this world; I had almost said it is tooworldly for this world.

The instance most quoted in our day is the thing called the humilityof the man of science; and certainly it is a good instance as wellas a modern one. Men find it extremely difficult to believethat a man who is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas,tearing down temples and stretching out hands to the stars,is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks to be allowed toindulge his harmless old hobby and follow his harmless old nose.When a man splits a grain of sand and the universe is turned upside downin consequence, it is difficult to realize that to the man who did it,the splitting of the grain is the great affair, and the capsizingof the cosmos quite a small one. It is hard to enter into the feelingsof a man who regards a new heaven and a new earth in the light of aby-product. But undoubtedly it was to this almost eerie innocenceof the intellect that the great men of the great scientific period,which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous power and triumph.If they had brought the heavens down like a house of cardstheir plea was not even that they had done it on principle;their quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident.Whenever there was in them the least touch of pride in whatthey had done, there was a good ground for attacking them;but so long as they were wholly humble, they were wholly victorious.There were possible answers to Huxley; there was no answer possibleto Darwin. He was convincing because of his unconsciousness;one might almost say because of his dulness. This childlikeand prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science.Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase is,in the part; they are beginning to be proud of their humility.They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of the world,beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talkof the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed,of the discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern English,they are beginning to be soft about their own hardness.They are becoming conscious of their own strength--that is,they are growing weaker. But one purely modern man has emergedin the strictly modern decades who does carry into our world the clearpersonal simplicity of the old world of science. One man of geniuswe have who is an artist, but who was a man of science, and who seemsto be marked above all things with this great scientific humility.I mean Mr. H. G. Wells. And in his case, as in the others abovespoken of, there must be a great preliminary difficulty in convincingthe ordinary person that such a virtue is predicable of such a man.Mr. Wells began his literary work with violent visions--visions ofthe last pangs of this planet; can it be that a man who beginswith violent visions is humble? He went on to wilder and wilderstories about carving beasts into men and shooting angels like birds.Is the man who shoots angels and carves beasts into men humble?Since then he has done something bolder than either of these blasphemies;he has prophesied the political future of all men; prophesied itwith aggressive authority and a ringing decision of detail.Is the prophet of the future of all men humble ? It will indeedbe difficult, in the present condition of current thought aboutsuch things as pride and humility, to answer the query of how a mancan be humble who does such big things and such bold things.For the only answer is the answer which I gave at the beginningof this essay. It is the humble man who does the big things.It is the humble man who does the bold things. It is the humbleman who has the sensational sights vouchsafed to him, and thisfor three obvious reasons: first, that he strains his eyes morethan any other men to see them; second, that he is more overwhelmedand uplifted with them when they come; third, that he recordsthem more exactly and sincerely and with less adulterationfrom his more commonplace and more conceited everyday self.Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected--that is,most romantic. Adventures are to the shy: in this sense adventuresare to the unadventurous.

Now, this arresting, mental humility in Mr. H. G. Wells may be,like a great many other things that are vital and vivid, difficult toillustrate by examples, but if I were asked for an example of it,I should have no difficulty about which example to begin with.The most interesting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he isthe only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has notstopped growing. One can lie awake at night and hear him grow.Of this growth the most evident manifestation is indeed a gradualchange of opinions; but it is no mere change of opinions.It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to another likethat of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous advance alonga quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the chiefproof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the factthat it has been upon the whole in advance from more startlingopinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sensean advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions.This fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur.Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classeswould be so much differentiated in the future that one class wouldeat the other. Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had oncefound arguments for so startling a view would ever have deserted itexcept for something yet more startling. Mr. Wells has deserted itin favour of the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimatelysubordinated or assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class,a class of engineers. He has abandoned the sensational theory withthe same honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it.Then he thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true.He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man cancome to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one.It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can standon a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twicetwo is four.

Mr. H. G. Wells exists at present in a gay and exhilarating progressof conservativism. He is finding out more and more that conventions,though silent, are alive. As good an example as any of thishumility and sanity of his may be found in his change of viewon the subject of science and marriage. He once held, I believe,the opinion which some singular sociologists still hold,that human creatures could successfully be paired and bred afterthe manner of dogs or horses. He no longer holds that view.Not only does he no longer hold that view, but he has written about itin "Mankind in the Making" with such smashing sense and humour, that Ifind it difficult to believe that anybody else can hold it either.It is true that his chief objection to the proposal is that it isphysically impossible, which seems to me a very slight objection,and almost negligible compared with the others. The one objectionto scientific marriage which is worthy of final attention is simplythat such a thing could only be imposed on unthinkable slavesand cowards. I do not know whether the scientific marriage-mongersare right (as they say) or wrong (as Mr. Wells says) in sayingthat medical supervision would produce strong and healthy men.I am only certain that if it did, the first act of the strongand healthy men would be to smash the medical supervision.

The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that itconnects the idea of health with the idea of care. What has healthto do with care? Health has to do with carelessness. In specialand abnormal cases it is necessary to have care. When we are peculiarlyunhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy.But even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless.If we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men,and they ought to be told to be careful. But when we are sociologistswe are addressing the normal man, we are addressing humanity.And humanity ought to be told to be recklessness itself.For all the fundamental functions of a healthy man ought emphaticallyto be performed with pleasure and for pleasure; they emphaticallyought not to be performed with precaution or for precaution.A man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy,and emphatically not because he has a body to sustain. A man oughtto take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foilsor horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake.And a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love,and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated.The food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinkingabout his tissues. The exercise will really get him into trainingso long as he is thinking about something else. And the marriage willreally stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generationif it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement.It is the first law of health that our necessities should not beaccepted as necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries.Let us, then, be careful about the small things, such as a scratchor a slight illness, or anything that can be managed with care.But in the name of all sanity, let us be careless about theimportant things, such as marriage, or the fountain of our verylife will fail.

Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrowerscientific outlook to see that there are some things which actuallyought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected withthe great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning notwith the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about,but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last.The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he doesnot sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men.In his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point ofthe Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begunwith the human soul--that is, if he had begun on himself--he wouldhave found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in.He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanentpossibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self,and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. Andthe weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatestdifficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then givean elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.They first assume that no man will want more than his share,and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his sharewill be delivered by motor-car or balloon. And an even strongerexample of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology canbe found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of allpatriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopiamust be a world-state, or else people might make war on it.It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it werea world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world.For if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion whatsense is there in thinking there will not be varieties in government?The fact is very simple. Unless you are going deliberately to preventa thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for.It is impossible to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations,because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals.If there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there wouldonly be a strife between Utopias. For the highest thing does not tendto union only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation.You can often get men to fight for the union; but you cannever prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation.This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism,the fierce nationalism of the great European civilization.It is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.

But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells's philosophy is a somewhatdeeper one, one that he expresses in a very entertaining mannerin the introductory part of the new Utopia. His philosophy in somesense amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself.At least, he maintains that there are no secure and reliableideas upon which we can rest with a final mental satisfaction.It will be both clearer, however, and more amusing to quoteMr. Wells himself.

He says, "Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain(except the mind of a pedant). . . . Being indeed!--there is no being,but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his backon truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals."Mr. Wells says, again, "There is no abiding thing in what we know.We change from weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerfullight pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and revealsfresh and different opacities below." Now, when Mr. Wellssays things like this, I speak with all respect when I saythat he does not observe an evident mental distinction.It cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in what we know.For if that were so we should not know it all and should not callit knowledge. Our mental state may be very different from thatof somebody else some thousands of years back; but it cannot beentirely different, or else we should not be conscious of a difference.Mr. Wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxesthat sit by the springs of truth. He must surely see that the factof two things being different implies that they are similar.The hare and the tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness,but they must agree in the quality of motion. The swiftest harecannot be swifter than an isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness.When we say the hare moves faster, we say that the tortoise moves.And when we say of a thing that it moves, we say, without needof other words, that there are things that do not move.And even in the act of saying that things change, we say that thereis something unchangeable.

But certainly the best example of Mr. Wells's fallacy can befound in the example which he himself chooses. It is quite truethat we see a dim light which, compared with a darker thing,is light, but which, compared with a stronger light, is darkness.But the quality of light remains the same thing, or else weshould not call it a stronger light or recognize it as such.If the character of light were not fixed in the mind, we should bequite as likely to call a denser shadow a stronger light, or viceversa If the character of light became even for an instant unfixed,if it became even by a hair's-breadth doubtful, if, for example,there crept into our idea of light some vague idea of blueness,then in that flash we have become doubtful whether the new lighthas more light or less. In brief, the progress may be as varyingas a cloud, but the direction must be as rigid as a French road.North and South are relative in the sense that I am North of Bournemouthand South of Spitzbergen. But if there be any doubt of the positionof the North Pole, there is in equal degree a doubt of whether Iam South of Spitzbergen at all. The absolute idea of light may bepractically unattainable. We may not be able to procure pure light.We may not be able to get to the North Pole. But because the NorthPole is unattainable, it does not follow that it is indefinable.And it is only because the North Pole is not indefinable that wecan make a satisfactory map of Brighton and Worthing.

In other words, Plato turned his face to truth but his back onMr. H. G. Wells, when he turned to his museum of specified ideals.It is precisely here that Plato shows his sense. It is not truethat everything changes; the things that change are all the manifestand material things. There is something that does not change;and that is precisely the abstract quality, the invisible idea.Mr. Wells says truly enough, that a thing which we have seen in oneconnection as dark we may see in another connection as light.But the thing common to both incidents is the mere idea of light--which we have not seen at all. Mr. Wells might grow taller and tallerfor unending aeons till his head was higher than the loneliest star.I can imagine his writing a good novel about it. In that casehe would see the trees first as tall things and then as short things;he would see the clouds first as high and then as low.But there would remain with him through the ages in that starryloneliness the idea of tallness; he would have in the awful spacesfor companion and comfort the definite conception that he was growingtaller and not (for instance) growing fatter.

And now it comes to my mind that Mr. H. G. Wells actually has writtena very delightful romance about men growing as tall as trees;and that here, again, he seems to me to have been a victim of thisvague relativism. "The Food of the Gods" is, like Mr. BernardShaw's play, in essence a study of the Superman idea. And it lies,I think, even through the veil of a half-pantomimic allegory,open to the same intellectual attack. We cannot be expected to haveany regard for a great creature if he does not in any manner conformto our standards. For unless he passes our standard of greatnesswe cannot even call him great. Nietszche summed up all that isinteresting in the Superman idea when he said, "Man is a thingwhich has to be surpassed." But the very word "surpass" impliesthe existence of a standard common to us and the thing surpassing us.If the Superman is more manly than men are, of course they willultimately deify him, even if they happen to kill him first.But if he is simply more supermanly, they may be quite indifferentto him as they would be to another seemingly aimless monstrosity.He must submit to our test even in order to overawe us.Mere force or size even is a standard; but that alone will nevermake men think a man their superior. Giants, as in the wise oldfairy-tales, are vermin. Supermen, if not good men, are vermin.

"The Food of the Gods" is the tale of "Jack the Giant-Killer"told from the point of view of the giant. This has not, I think,been done before in literature; but I have little doubt that thepsychological substance of it existed in fact. I have little doubtthat the giant whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman.It is likely enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial personwho wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force.If (as not unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads,he would point out the elementary maxim which declares themto be better than one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernityof such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subjectfrom two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude.But Jack was the champion of the enduring human standards,of the principle of one man one head and one man one conscience,of the single head and the single heart and the single eye.Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the giant wasa particularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know was whetherhe was a good giant--that is, a giant who was any good to us.What were the giant's religious views; what his views on politicsand the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of children--or fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense ? To use a finephrase for emotional sanity, was his heart in the right place?Jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in order to find out.The old and correct story of Jack the Giant-Killer is simply the wholestory of man; if it were understood we should need no Bibles or histories.But the modern world in particular does not seem to understand it at all.The modern world, like Mr. Wells is on the side of the giants;the safest place, and therefore the meanest and the most prosaic.The modern world, when it praises its little Caesars,talks of being strong and brave: but it does not seem to seethe eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of these ideas.The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave;and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted,in time of doubt, to be strong. The only way in which a giant couldreally keep himself in training against the inevitable Jack wouldbe by continually fighting other giants ten times as big as himself.That is by ceasing to be a giant and becoming a Jack.Thus that sympathy with the small or the defeated as such,with which we Liberals and Nationalists have been often reproached,is not a useless sentimentalism at all, as Mr. Wells and hisfriends fancy. It is the first law of practical courage.To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity more good thanthe advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like dragons.If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight him;but in that case, why not call him the Saint? But if he ismerely stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger,I do not care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with usat least for all the strength we have. It we are weaker than he,that is no reason why we should be weaker than ourselves.If we are not tall enough to touch the giant's knees, that isno reason why we should become shorter by falling on our own.But that is at bottom the meaning of all modern hero-worshipand celebration of the Strong Man, the Caesar the Superman.That he may be something more than man, we must be something less.

Doubtless there is an older and better hero-worship than this.But the old hero was a being who, like Achilles, was more humanthan humanity itself. Nietzsche's Superman is cold and friendless.Achilles is so foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughtersarmies in the agony of his bereavement. Mr. Shaw's sad Caesar saysin his desolate pride, "He who has never hoped can never despair."The Man-God of old answers from his awful hill, "Was ever sorrowlike unto my sorrow?" A great man is not a man so strong that he feelsless than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.And when Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you, `be hard,'"he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, `be dead.'"Sensibility is the definition of life.

I recur for a last word to Jack the Giant-Killer. I have dwelton this matter of Mr. Wells and the giants, not because it isspecially prominent in his mind; I know that the Superman doesnot bulk so large in his cosmos as in that of Mr. Bernard Shaw.I have dwelt on it for the opposite reason; because this heresyof immoral hero-worship has taken, I think, a slighter hold of him,and may perhaps still be prevented from perverting one ofthe best thinkers of the day. In the course of "The New Utopia"Mr. Wells makes more than one admiring allusion to Mr. W. E. Henley.That clever and unhappy man lived in admiration of a vague violence,and was always going back to rude old tales and rude old ballads,to strong and primitive literatures, to find the praise of strengthand the justification of tyranny. But he could not find it.It is not there. The primitive literature is shown in the tale of Jackthe Giant-Killer. The strong old literature is all in praise of the weak.The rude old tales are as tender to minorities as any modernpolitical idealist. The rude old ballads are as sentimentallyconcerned for the under-dog as the Aborigines Protection Society.When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks andhard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had onlytwo kinds of songs. The first was a rejoicing that the weak hadconquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had,for once in a way, conquered the weak. For this defiance ofthe statu quo, this constant effort to alter the existing balance,this premature challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature andinmost secret of the psychological adventure which is called man.It is his strength to disdain strength. The forlorn hopeis not only a real hope, it is the only real hope of mankind.In the coarsest ballads of the greenwood men are admired most whenthey defy, not only the king, but what is more to the point, the hero.The moment Robin Hood becomes a sort of Superman, that momentthe chivalrous chronicler shows us Robin thrashed by a poor tinkerwhom he thought to thrust aside. And the chivalrous chroniclermakes Robin Hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration.This magnanimity is not a product of modern humanitarianism;it is not a product of anything to do with peace.This magnanimity is merely one of the lost arts of war.The Henleyites call for a sturdy and fighting England, and they goback to the fierce old stories of the sturdy and fighting English.And the thing that they find written across that fierce oldliterature everywhere, is "the policy of Majuba."

Chesterton, Heretics, 4

2009-07-31T00:21:00.000+02:00

Mr. Bernard Shaw

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities,when genial old Ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy, and thekindly tales of the forgotten Emile Zola kept our firesides merryand pure, it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.It may be doubted whether it is always or even generally a disadvantage.The man who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies,that they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign.They go out against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows.There are several modern examples of this situation. Mr. Chamberlain,for instance, is a very good one. He constantly eludes or vanquisheshis opponents because his real powers and deficiencies are quitedifferent to those with which he is credited, both by friends and foes.His friends depict him as a strenuous man of action; his opponentsdepict him as a coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is neitherone nor the other, but an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor.He has one power which is the soul of melodrama--the power of pretending,even when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall.For all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must makesome show of misfortune--that sort of hypocrisy is the homagethat strength pays to weakness. He talks foolishly and yetvery finely about his own city that has never deserted him.He wears a flaming and fantastic flower, like a decadent minor poet.As for his bluffness and toughness and appeals to common sense,all that is, of course, simply the first trick of rhetoric.He fronts his audiences with the venerable affectation of Mark Antony--

"I am no orator, as Brutus is; But as you know me all, a plain blunt man."
It is the whole difference between the aim of the orator andthe aim of any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor.The aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor;the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator.Once let Mr. Chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and hisgame is won. He has only to compose a theme on empire, and peoplewill say that these plain men say great things on great occasions.He has only to drift in the large loose notions common to allartists of the second rank, and people will say that businessmen have the biggest ideals after all. All his schemes haveended in smoke; he has touched nothing that he did not confuse.About his figure there is a Celtic pathos; like the Gaels in MatthewArnold's quotation, "he went forth to battle, but he always fell."He is a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures; but stilla mountain. And a mountain is always romantic.

There is another man in the modern world who might be calledthe antithesis of Mr. Chamberlain in every point, who is alsoa standing monument of the advantage of being misunderstood.Mr. Bernard Shaw is always represented by those who disagreewith him, and, I fear, also (if such exist) by those who agree with him,as a capering humorist, a dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist.It is said that he cannot be taken seriously, that he will defend anythingor attack anything, that he will do anything to startle and amuse.All this is not only untrue, but it is, glaringly, the opposite ofthe truth; it is as wild as to say that Dickens had not the boisterousmasculinity of Jane Austen. The whole force and triumph of Mr. BernardShaw lie in the fact that he is a thoroughly consistent man.So far from his power consisting in jumping through hoops or standing onhis head, his power consists in holding his own fortress night and day.He puts the Shaw test rapidly and rigorously to everythingthat happens in heaven or earth. His standard never varies.The thing which weak-minded revolutionists and weak-minded Conservativesreally hate (and fear) in him, is exactly this, that his scales,such as they are, are held even, and that his law, such as it is,is justly enforced. You may attack his principles, as I do; but Ido not know of any instance in which you can attack their application.If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the lawlessness of Socialistsas much as that of Individualists. If he dislikes the fever of patriotism,he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen as well as in Englishmen.If he dislikes the vows and bonds of marriage, he dislikes stillmore the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that are made by lawless love.If he laughs at the authority of priests, he laughs louder at the pomposityof men of science. If he condemns the irresponsibility of faith,he condemns with a sane consistency the equal irresponsibility of art.He has pleased all the bohemians by saying that women are equal to men;but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women.He is almost mechanically just; he has something of the terriblequality of a machine. The man who is really wild and whirling,the man who is really fantastic and incalculable, is not Mr. Shaw,but the average Cabinet Minister. It is Sir Michael Hicks-Beach whojumps through hoops. It is Sir Henry Fowler who stands on his head.The solid and respectable statesman of that type does reallyleap from position to position; he is really ready to defendanything or nothing; he is really not to be taken seriously.I know perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be sayingthirty years hence; he will be saying what he has always said.If thirty years hence I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent beingwith a silver beard sweeping the earth, and say to him,"One can never, of course, make a verbal attack upon a lady,"the patriarch will lift his aged hand and fell me to the earth.We know, I say, what Mr. Shaw will be, saying thirty years hence.But is there any one so darkly read in stars and oracles that he willdare to predict what Mr. Asquith will be saying thirty years hence?

The truth is, that it is quite an error to suppose that absenceof definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility.A man who believes something is ready and witty, because he hasall his weapons about him. he can apply his test in an instant.The man engaged in conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw mayfancy he has ten faces; similarly a man engaged against a brilliantduellist may fancy that the sword of his foe has turned to ten swordsin his hand. But this is not really because the man is playingwith ten swords, it is because he is aiming very straight with one.Moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre,because he does not change with the world; he has climbed intoa fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope.Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensiblemerely because they always catch the fashionable insanity,because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstromof the world.

People accuse Mr. Shaw and many much sillier persons of "proving that blackis white." But they never ask whether the current colour-language isalways correct. Ordinary sensible phraseology sometimes calls black white,it certainly calls yellow white and green white and reddish-brown white.We call wine "white wine" which is as yellow as a Blue-coat boy's legs.We call grapes "white grapes" which are manifestly pale green.We give to the European, whose complexion is a sort of pink drab,the horrible title of a "white man"--a picture more blood-curdlingthan any spectre in Poe.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man asked a waiter in a restaurantfor a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes, the waiterwould think him mad. It is undoubtedly true that if a Government official,reporting on the Europeans in Burmah, said, "There are only twothousand pinkish men here" he would be accused of cracking jokes,and kicked out of his post. But it is equally obvious that bothmen would have come to grief through telling the strict truth.That too truthful man in the restaurant; that too truthful manin Burmah, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. He appears eccentric and grotesquebecause he will not accept the general belief that white is yellow.He has based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed,but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction.Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction,for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

So much then a reasonable appreciation will find in Mr. Shawto be bracing and excellent. He claims to see things as they are;and some things, at any rate, he does see as they are,which the whole of our civilization does not see at all.But in Mr. Shaw's realism there is something lacking, and that thingwhich is lacking is serious.

Mr. Shaw's old and recognized philosophy was that powerfullypresented in "The Quintessence of Ibsenism." It was, in brief,that conservative ideals were bad, not because They were conservative,but because they were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judgingjustly the particular case; every moral generalization oppressedthe individual; the golden rule was there was no golden rule.And the objection to this is simply that it pretends to free men,but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do.What is the good of telling a community that it has every libertyexcept the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is whatconstitutes a free people. And what is the good of telling a man(or a philosopher) that he has every liberty except the liberty tomake generalizations. Making generalizations is what makes him a man.In short, when Mr. Shaw forbids men to have strict moral ideals,he is acting like one who should forbid them to have children.The saying that "the golden rule is that there is no golden rule,"can, indeed, be simply answered by being turned round.That there is no golden rule is itself a golden rule, or ratherit is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron rule;a fetter on the first movement of a man.

But the sensation connected with Mr. Shaw in recent years hasbeen his sudden development of the religion of the Superman.He who had to all appearance mocked at the faiths in the forgottenpast discovered a new god in the unimaginable future. He who had laidall the blame on ideals set up the most impossible of all ideals,the ideal of a new creature. But the truth, nevertheless, is that anyone who knows Mr. Shaw's mind adequately, and admires it properly,must have guessed all this long ago.

For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really are.If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them.He has always had a secret ideal that has withered all the thingsof this world. He has all the time been silently comparing humanitywith something that was not human, with a monster from Mars,with the Wise Man of the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the Fabians,with Julius Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman. Now, to havethis inner and merciless standard may be a very good thing,or a very bad one, it may be excellent or unfortunate, but itis not seeing things as they are. it is not seeing things as theyare to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then callevery man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing thingsas they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes,and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one.And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigodof infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latterdays of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. And thisis what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done. When we really seemen as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly.For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs,with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for thisplace or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter.It is only the quite arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison withsomething else which makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him.A sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere factswould make, our knees knock under as with religious fear. It is the factthat every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy.It is the fact that every face in the street has the incredibleunexpectedness of a fairy-tale. The thing which prevents a manfrom realizing this is not any clear-sightedness or experience,it is simply a habit of pedantic and fastidious comparisonsbetween one thing and another. Mr. Shaw, on the practical sideperhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense inhumane.He has even been infected to some extent with the primaryintellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strangenotion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he woulddespise other things. The greater and stronger a man is the morehe would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle.That Mr. Shaw keeps a lifted head and a contemptuous face beforethe colossal panorama of empires and civilizations, this doesnot in itself convince one that he sees things as they are.I should be most effectively convinced that he did if I foundhim staring with religious astonishment at his own feet."What are those two beautiful and industrious beings," I can imagine himmurmuring to himself, "whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not why?What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when Iwas born? What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs,must I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?"

The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certainmystery of humility and almost of darkness. The man who said,"Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,"put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth "Blessedis he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised."The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see,and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he thatexpecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains;blessed is the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. Until werealize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the lightas a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness,all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine.Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God,and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war.It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothinguntil we know nothing,

Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatnessof Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man,that he is not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception tothe general and essential maxim, that little things please great minds.And from this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility,comes incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman.After belabouring a great many people for a great many years forbeing unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense,that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with twolegs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whetherhumanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased,would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity.Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanitywith all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake.If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress,Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kindof man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitterfood for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it wasnot suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food,but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuableand lovable in our eyes is man--the old beer-drinking,creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man.And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain;the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman havedied with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth.When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society,He chose for its comer-stone neither the brilliant Paul northe mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob a coward--in a word, a man.And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hellhave not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdomshave failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness,that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men.But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was foundedon a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible.For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.

Chesterton, Heretics, 3

2009-07-30T00:20:00.000+02:00

On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject;the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores.When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omittedto notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores,the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself.The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may,in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainlyproved himself prosaic.

We might, no doubt, find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grassor all the leaves of the trees; but this would not be because of ourboldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety.The bore would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades ofgrass as splendid as the swords of an army. The bore is strongerand more joyous than we are; he is a demigod--nay, he is a god.For it is the gods who do not tire of the iteration of things;to them the nightfall is always new, and the last rose as redas the first.

The sense that everything is poetical is a thing solid and absolute;it is not a mere matter of phraseology or persuasion. It is notmerely true, it is ascertainable. Men may be challenged to deny it;men may be challenged to mention anything that is not a matter of poetry.I remember a long time ago a sensible sub-editor coming up to mewith a book in his hand, called "Mr. Smith," or "The Smith Family,"or some such thing. He said, "Well, you won't get any of your damnedmysticism out of this," or words to that effect. I am happy to saythat I undeceived him; but the victory was too obvious and easy.In most cases the name is unpoetical, although the fact is poetical.In the case of Smith, the name is so poetical that it mustbe an arduous and heroic matter for the man to live up to it.The name of Smith is the name of the one trade that even kings respected,it could claim half the glory of that arma virumque which allepics acclaimed. The spirit of the smithy is so close to the spiritof song that it has mixed in a million poems, and every blacksmithis a harmonious blacksmith.

Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smithis poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic,when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows inthe cavern of that creative violence. The brute repose of Nature,the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals,the wierdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subduedby its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword andthe steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms,all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly,on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith. Yet our novelists call theirhero "Aylmer Valence," which means nothing, or "Vernon Raymond,"which means nothing, when it is in their power to give himthis sacred name of Smith--this name made of iron and flame.It would be very natural if a certain hauteur, a certain carriageof the head, a certain curl of the lip, distinguished everyone whose name is Smith. Perhaps it does; I trust so.Whoever else are parvenus, the Smiths are not parvenus.From the darkest dawn of history this clan has gone forth to battle;its trophies are on every hand; its name is everywhere;it is older than the nations, and its sign is the Hammer of Thor.But as I also remarked, it is not quite the usual case.It is common enough that common things should be poetical;it is not so common that common names should be poetical.In most cases it is the name that is the obstacle.A great many people talk as if this claim of ours, that all thingsare poetical, were a mere literary ingenuity, a play on words.Precisely the contrary is true. It is the idea that some things arenot poetical which is literary, which is a mere product of words.The word "signal-box" is unpoetical. But the thing signal-box isnot unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance,light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death.That is the plain, genuine description of what it is; the prose onlycomes in with what it is called. The word "pillar-box" is unpoetical.But the thing pillar-box is not unpoetical; it is the placeto which friends and lovers commit their messages, conscious thatwhen they have done so they are sacred, and not to be touched,not only by others, but even (religious touch!) by themselves.That red turret is one of the last of the temples. Posting a letter andgetting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic;for to be entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable.We think a pillar-box prosaic, because there is no rhyme to it.We think a pillar-box unpoetical, because we have never seen itin a poem. But the bold fact is entirely on the side of poetry.A signal-box is only called a signal-box; it is a house of life and death.A pillar-box is only called a pillar-box; it is a sanctuary ofhuman words. If you think the name of "Smith" prosaic, it is notbecause you are practical and sensible; it is because you are too muchaffected with literary refinements. The name shouts poetry at you.If you think of it otherwise, it is because you are steeped andsodden with verbal reminiscences, because you remember everythingin Punch or Comic Cuts about Mr. Smith being drunk or Mr. Smithbeing henpecked. All these things were given to you poetical.It is only by a long and elaborate process of literary effortthat you have made them prosaic.

Now, the first and fairest thing to say about Rudyard Kiplingis that he has borne a brilliant part in thus recovering the lostprovinces of poetry. He has not been frightened by that brutalmaterialistic air which clings only to words; he has pierced throughto the romantic, imaginative matter of the things themselves.He has perceived the significance and philosophy of steam and of slang.Steam may be, if you like, a dirty by-product of science.Slang may be, if you like, a dirty by-product of language.But at least he has been among the few who saw the divine parentage ofthese things, and knew that where there is smoke there is fire--that is,that wherever there is the foulest of things, there also is the purest.Above all, he has had something to say, a definite view of things to utter,and that always means that a man is fearless and faces everything.For the moment we have a view of the universe, we possess it.

Now, the message of Rudyard Kipling, that upon which he hasreally concentrated, is the only thing worth worrying aboutin him or in any other man. He has often written bad poetry,like Wordsworth. He has often said silly things, like Plato.He has often given way to mere political hysteria, like Gladstone.But no one can reasonably doubt that he means steadily and sincerelyto say something, and the only serious question is, What is thatwhich he has tried to say? Perhaps the best way of stating thisfairly will be to begin with that element which has been most insistedby himself and by his opponents--I mean his interest in militarism.But when we are seeking for the real merits of a man it is unwiseto go to his enemies, and much more foolish to go to himself.

Now, Mr. Kipling is certainly wrong in his worship of militarism,but his opponents are, generally speaking, quite as wrong as he.The evil of militarism is not that it shows certain men to be fierceand haughty and excessively warlike. The evil of militarism is that itshows most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable.The professional soldier gains more and more power as the generalcourage of a community declines. Thus the Pretorian guard becamemore and more important in Rome as Rome became more and moreluxurious and feeble. The military man gains the civil powerin proportion as the civilian loses the military virtues.And as it was in ancient Rome so it is in contemporary Europe.There never was a time when nations were more militarist.There never was a time when men were less brave. All ages and all epicshave sung of arms and the man; but we have effected simultaneouslythe deterioration of the man and the fantastic perfection of the arms.Militarism demonstrated the decadence of Rome, and it demonstratesthe decadence of Prussia.

And unconsciously Mr. Kipling has proved this, and proved it admirably.For in so far as his work is earnestly understood the military tradedoes not by any means emerge as the most important or attractive.He has not written so well about soldiers as he has aboutrailway men or bridge builders, or even journalists.The fact is that what attracts Mr. Kipling to militarismis not the idea of courage, but the idea of discipline.There was far more courage to the square mile in the Middle Ages,when no king had a standing army, but every man had a bow or sword.But the fascination of the standing army upon Mr. Kipling isnot courage, which scarcely interests him, but discipline, which is,when all is said and done, his primary theme. The modern armyis not a miracle of courage; it has not enough opportunities,owing to the cowardice of everybody else. But it is reallya miracle of organization, and that is the truly Kiplingite ideal.Kipling's subject is not that valour which properly belongs to war,but that interdependence and efficiency which belongs quiteas much to engineers, or sailors, or mules, or railway engines.And thus it is that when he writes of engineers, or sailors,or mules, or steam-engines, he writes at his best. The real poetry,the "true romance" which Mr. Kipling has taught, is the romanceof the division of labour and the discipline of all the trades.He sings the arts of peace much more accurately than the arts of war.And his main contention is vital and valuable. Every thing is militaryin the sense that everything depends upon obedience. There is noperfectly epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place.Everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission.We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness.But we are glad that the net-maker did not make the hammock in a fit ofdivine carelessness. We may jump upon a child's rocking-horse for a joke.But we are glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of itunglued for a joke. So far from having merely preached that a soldiercleaning his side-arm is to be adored because he is military,Kipling at his best and clearest has preached that the baker bakingloaves and the tailor cutting coats is as military as anybody.

Being devoted to this multitudinous vision of duty, Mr. Kiplingis naturally a cosmopolitan. He happens to find his examplesin the British Empire, but almost any other empire woulddo as well, or, indeed, any other highly civilized country.That which he admires in the British army he would find even moreapparent in the German army; that which he desires in the Britishpolice he would find flourishing, in the French police.The ideal of discipline is not the whole of life, but it is spreadover the whole of the world. And the worship of it tends to confirmin Mr. Kipling a certain note of worldly wisdom, of the experienceof the wanderer, which is one of the genuine charms of his best work.

The great gap in his mind is what may be roughly called the lackof patriotism--that is to say, he lacks altogether the faculty of attachinghimself to any cause or community finally and tragically; for allfinality must be tragic. He admires England, but he does not love her;for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons.He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.There is no harshness in saying this, for, to do him justice, he avowsit with his usual picturesque candour. In a very interesting poem,he says that--

"If England was what England seems"
--that is, weak and inefficient; if England were not what (as he believes)she is--that is, powerful and practical--

"How quick we'd chuck 'er! But she ain't!"
He admits, that is, that his devotion is the result of a criticism,and this is quite enough to put it in another category altogether fromthe patriotism of the Boers, whom he hounded down in South Africa.In speaking of the really patriotic peoples, such as the Irish, he hassome difficulty in keeping a shrill irritation out of his language.The frame of mind which he really describes with beauty andnobility is the frame of mind of the cosmopolitan man who has seenmen and cities.

"For to admire and for to see, For to be'old this world so wide."
He is a perfect master of that light melancholy with which a manlooks back on having been the citizen of many communities,of that light melancholy with which a man looks back on having beenthe lover of many women. He is the philanderer of the nations.But a man may have learnt much about women in flirtations,and still be ignorant of first love; a man may have known as manylands as Ulysses, and still be ignorant of patriotism.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling has asked in a celebrated epigram what they canknow of England who know England only. It is a far deeper and sharperquestion to ask, "What can they know of England who know only the world?"for the world does not include England any more than it includesthe Church. The moment we care for anything deeply, the world--that is, all the other miscellaneous interests--becomes our enemy.Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one's self"unspotted from the world;" but lovers talk of it just as muchwhen they talk of the "world well lost." Astronomically speaking,I understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I supposethat the Church was a part of the world, and even the loversinhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth--the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe.Thus Mr. Kipling does certainly know the world; he is a man of the world,with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet.He knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice.He has been to England a great many times; he has stopped therefor long visits. But he does not belong to it, or to any place;and the proof of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place.The moment we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes.We live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe.

The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant.He is always breathing, an air of locality. London is a place, to becompared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo.But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live menwho regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality,but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer hasseen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things thatdivide men--diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa,or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or redpaint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field hasseen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men--hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menaceof the sky. Mr. Kipling, with all his merits, is the globe-trotter;he has not the patience to become part of anything.So great and genuine a man is not to be accused of a merelycynical cosmopolitanism; still, his cosmopolitanism is his weakness.That weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his finest poems,"The Sestina of the Tramp Royal," in which a man declares that he canendure anything in the way of hunger or horror, but not permanentpresence in one place. In this there is certainly danger.The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about;dust is like this and the thistle-down and the High Commissionerin South Africa. Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavyfruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile. In the heated idlenessof youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implicationof that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We wereinclined to ask, "Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?"But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right.The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rollingstone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller.The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller.The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscopethat makes it larger. Before long the world will be clovenwith a war between the telescopists and the microscopists.The first study large things and live in a small world; the secondstudy small things and live in a large world. It is inspiritingwithout doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabiaas a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabiais not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. Theyare ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures.If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers,it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets.To conquer these places is to lose them. The man standingin his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate,is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the motor-carstupidly destroys it. Moderns think of the earth as a globe,as something one can easily get round, the spirit of a schoolmistress.This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made about Cecil Rhodes.His enemies say that he may have had large ideas, but he was a bad man.His friends say that he may have been a bad man, but he certainlyhad large ideas. The truth is that he was not a man essentially bad,he was a man of much geniality and many good intentions, but a manwith singularly small views. There is nothing large about paintingthe map red; it is an innocent game for children. It is just as easyto think in continents as to think in cobble-stones. The difficultycomes in when we seek to know the substance of either of them.Rhodes' prophecies about the Boer resistance are an admirablecomment on how the "large ideas" prosper when it is not a questionof thinking in continents but of understanding a few two-legged men.And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet,with its empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of mangoes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvestor that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched.And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smileof amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way,outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing,roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to findthe sun cockney and the stars suburban.

Chesterton, Heretics, 2

2009-07-29T00:19:00.001+02:00

On the negative spirit

Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which as often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense,necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality.It is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal,in what Stevenson called, with his usual startling felicity,"the lost fight of virtue." A modern morality, on the other hand,can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of law; its only certainty is a certainty of ill.It can only point to imperfection. It has no perfection to point to.But the monk meditating upon Christ or Buddha has in his mind an image of perfect health, a thing of clear colours and clean air.He may contemplate this ideal wholeness and happiness far more than he ought;he may contemplate it to the neglect of exclusion of essential THING She may contemplate it until he has become a dreamer or a driveller; but still it is wholeness and happiness that he is contemplating.He may even go mad; but he is going mad for the love of sanity.But the modern student of ethics, even if he remains sane, remains sane from an insane dread of insanity.

The anchorite rolling on the stones in a frenzy of submissionis a healthier person fundamentally than many a sober man in a silk hat who is walking down Cheapside. For many such are good only through a withering knowledge of evil.I am not at this moment claiming for the devotee anything more than this primary advantage, that though he may be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is still fixing his thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness,on a strength that has no limits, and a happiness that has no end.Doubtless there are other objections which can be urged without unreason against the influence of gods and visions in morality,whether in the cell or street. But this advantage the mystic morality must always have--it is always jollier. A young man may keep himself from vice by continually thinking of disease. He may keep himself from it also by continually thinking of the Virgin Mary. There may be question about which method isthe more reasonable, or even about which is the more efficient. But surely there can be no question about which is the more wholesome.

I remember a pamphlet by that able and sincere secularist, Mr. G. W. Foote, which contained a phrase sharply symbolizing and dividing these two methods. The pamphlet was called BEER AND BIBLE, those two very noble things, all the nobler for a conjunction which Mr. Foote, in his stern old Puritan way, seemed to think sardonic,but which I confess to thinking appropriate and charming.I have not the work by me, but I remember that Mr. Foote dismissed very contemptuously any attempts to deal with the problemof strong drink by religious offices or intercessions, and said that a picture of a drunkard's liver would be more efficacious in the matter of temperance than any prayer or praise.In that picturesque expression, it seems to me, is perfectly embodied the incurable morbidity of modern ethics.In that temple the lights are low, the crowds kneel, the solemn anthems are uplifted. But that upon the altar to which all men kneel is no longer the perfect flesh, the body and substance of the perfect man; it is still flesh, but it is diseased.It is the drunkard's liver of the New Testament that is marred for us, which which we take in remembrance of him.

Now, it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the nineteenth century. If any ordinary man ever said that he was horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsenor Maupassant, or by the plain language in which they are spoken of,that ordinary man was lying. The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never dream of printing.Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a new habit.On the contrary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence which is new still, though it is already dying. The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary honest man,whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not either disgusted or even annoyed at the candour of the moderns.What disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear idealism.Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic thing,the brutal thing, the thing that called names. This is the great difference between some recent developments of Nonconformity andthe great Puritanism of the seventeenth century. It was the whole point of the Puritans that they cared nothing for decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which the founders of Nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at kings and queens.But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke plainly about evil,it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly about good.The thing which is resented, and, as I think, rightly resented,in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is typical,is that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment,till it goes almost blind with doubt. If we compare, let us say,the morality of the DIVINE COMEDY with the morality of Ibsen's GHOSTS,we shall see all that modern ethics have really done.No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the INFERNO of an Early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism.But Dante describes three moral instruments--Heaven, Purgatory,and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement,and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one--Hell.It is often said, and with perfect truth, that no one could read a play like GHOSTS and remain indifferent to the necessity of anethical self-command. That is quite true, and the same is to be said of the most monstrous and material descriptions of the eternal fire.It is quite certain the realists like Zola do in one sense promote morality--they promote it in the sense in which the hangman promotes it, in the sense in which the devil promotes it. But they only affect that small minority which will accept any virtue of courage. Most healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they dismiss the possibility of bombs or microbes.Modern realists are indeed Terrorists, like the dynamiters;and they fail just as much in their effort to create a thrill.Both realists and dynamiters are well-meaning people engagedin the task, so obviously ultimately hopeless, of using science to promote morality.

I do not wish the reader to confuse me for a moment with those vague persons who imagine that Ibsen is what they call a pessimist. There are plenty of wholesome people in Ibsen, plenty of good people, plenty of happy people, plenty of examples of menacting wisely and things ending well. That is not my meaning. My meaning is that Ibsen has throughout, and does not disguise, a certain vagueness and a changing attitude as well as a doubting attitude towards what is really wisdom and virtue in this life--a vagueness which contrasts very remarkably with the decisivenesswith which he pounces on something which he perceives to be a rootof evil, some convention, some deception, some ignorance.We know that the hero of GHOSTS is mad, and we know why he is mad.We do also know that Dr. Stockman is sane; but we do not knowwhy he is sane. Ibsen does not profess to know how virtueand happiness are brought about, in the sense that he professesto know how our modern sexual tragedies are brought about.Falsehood works ruin in THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY, but truth works equalruin in THE WILD DUCK. There are no cardinal virtues of Ibsenism.There is no ideal man of Ibsen. All this is not only admitted,but vaunted in the most valuable and thoughtful of all the eulogiesupon Ibsen, Mr. Bernard Shaw's QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM.Mr. Shaw sums up Ibsen's teaching in the phrase, "The goldenrule is that there is no golden rule." In his eyes thisabsence of an enduring and positive ideal, this absenceof a permanent key to virtue, is the one great Ibsen merit.I am not discussing now with any fullness whether this is so or not.All I venture to point out, with an increased firmness,is that this omission, good or bad, does leave us face to facewith the problem of a human consciousness filled with verydefinite images of evil, and with no definite image of good.To us light must be henceforward the dark thing--the thing of whichwe cannot speak. To us, as to Milton's devils in Pandemonium,it is darkness that is visible. The human race, according to religion,fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil.Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evilremains to us.

A great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken disappointment,has in our time fallen on our Northern civilization. All previousages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realizewhat is really the right life, what was really the good man.A definite part of the modern world has come beyond questionto the conclusion that there is no answer to these questions,that the most that we can do is to set up a few notice-boardsat places of obvious danger, to warn men, for instance,against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mereexistence of their neighbours. Ibsen is the first to returnfrom the baffled hunt to bring us the tidings of great failure.

Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals isa dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good.We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it,is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talkingabout "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good.We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodgeto avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let usleave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty."This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good,but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says,"Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress."This, logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good;but let us settle whether we are getting more of it."He says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopesof the race, but in education." This, clearly expressed,means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give itto our children."

Mr. H.G. Wells, that exceedingly clear-sighted man, has pointed out in arecent work that this has happened in connection with economic questions.The old economists, he says, made generalizations, and they were(in Mr. Wells's view) mostly wrong. But the new economists, he says,seem to have lost the power of making any generalizations at all.And they cover this incapacity with a general claim to be, in specific cases,regarded as "experts", a claim "proper enough in a hairdresser or afashionable physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of science."But in spite of the refreshing rationality with which Mr. Wells hasindicated this, it must also be said that he himself has falleninto the same enormous modern error. In the opening pages of thatexcellent book MANKIND IN THE MAKING, he dismisses the ideals of art,religion, abstract morality, and the rest, and says that he is goingto consider men in their chief function, the function of parenthood.He is going to discuss life as a "tissue of births." He is not goingto ask what will produce satisfactory saints or satisfactory heroes,but what will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers. The whole is setforward so sensibly that it is a few moments at least before the readerrealises that it is another example of unconscious shirking. What is the goodof begetting a man until we have settled what is the good of being a man?You are merely handing on to him a problem you dare not settle yourself.It is as if a man were asked, "What is the use of a hammer?" and answered,"To make hammers"; and when asked, "And of those hammers, what isthe use?" answered, "To make hammers again". Just as such a man wouldbe perpetually putting off the question of the ultimate use of carpentry,so Mr. Wells and all the rest of us are by these phrases successfullyputting off the question of the ultimate value of the human life.

The case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed,an extreme one. As enunciated today, "progress" is simplya comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brutepleasure with the alternative ideal of progress--that is to say,we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about,with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobodyknows what. Progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a mostdignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in oppositionto precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. So far from it beingthe truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against thatof ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth.Nobody has any business to use the word "progress" unlesshe has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals.Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almostsay that nobody can be progressive without being infallible--at any rate, without believing in some infallibility.For progress by its very name indicates a direction;and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction,we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress.Never perhaps since the beginning of the world has there beenan age that had less right to use the word "progress" than we.In the Catholic twelfth century, in the philosophic eighteenthcentury, the direction may have been a good or a bad one,men may have differed more or less about how far they went, and inwhat direction, but about the direction they did in the main agree,and consequently they had the genuine sensation of progress.But it is precisely about the direction that we disagree.Whether the future excellence lies in more law or less law,in more liberty or less liberty; whether property will be finallyconcentrated or finally cut up; whether sexual passion will reachits sanest in an almost virgin intellectualism or in a fullanimal freedom; whether we should love everybody with Tolstoy,or spare nobody with Nietzsche;--these are the things about which weare actually fighting most. It is not merely true that the agewhich has settled least what is progress is this "progressive" age.It is, moreover, true that the people who have settled leastwhat is progress are the most "progressive" people in it.The ordinary mass, the men who have never troubled about progress,might be trusted perhaps to progress. The particular individualswho talk about progress would certainly fly to the fourwinds of heaven when the pistol-shot started the race.I do not, therefore, say that the word "progress" is unmeaning; I sayit is unmeaning without the previous definition of a moral doctrine,and that it can only be applied to groups of persons who holdthat doctrine in common. Progress is not an illegitimate word,but it is logically evident that it is illegitimate for us.It is a sacred word, a word which could only rightly be usedby rigid believers and in the ages of faith.

Chesterton, Heretics, 1

2009-07-28T00:18:00.002+02:00

Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy

Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word "orthodox." In former days the hereticwas proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics.He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them;they had rebelled against him. The armies with their cruel security,the kings with their cold faces, the decorous processes of State,the reasonable processes of law--all these like sheep had gone astray.The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right.If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man;he was a church. He was the centre of the universe; it was round him that the stars swung. All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical.But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says,with a conscious laugh, "I suppose I am very heretical," and looks round for applause. The word "heresy" not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous.The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right;it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing,and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical.The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy.The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is,at least he is orthodox.

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy.This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter,and this is done universally in the twentieth century,in the decadence of the great revolutionary period.General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint.We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: "The golden rule is that there is no golden rule."We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature.A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters;his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object,the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost.Everything matters--except everything.

Examples are scarcely needed of this total levity on the subject of cosmic philosophy. Examples are scarcely needed to show that,whatever else we think of as affecting practical affairs, we do not think it matters whether a man is a pessimist or an optimist,a Cartesian or a Hegelian, a materialist or a spiritualist.Let me, however, take a random instance. At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, "Life is not worth living."We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day;nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the manor on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed,the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines;doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins.Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories do not matter.

This was certainly not the idea of those who introduced our freedom. When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made.Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says.The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating.Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, any one can discuss it. The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it.Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions,has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist.Then came the Bradlaughites, the last religious men, the last men who cared about God; but they could not alter it. It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But their agony has achieved just this--that now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.Emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of silence as the heresiarch. Then we talk about Lord Anglesey and the weather,and call it the complete liberty of all the creeds.

But there are some people, nevertheless--and I am one of them--who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers,but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy.We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them.In the fifteenth century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the nineteenth century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude,and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel;there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous.The age of the Inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict for practising.

Now, in our time, philosophy or religion, our theory, that is, about ultimate things, has been driven out, more or less simultaneously, from two fields which it used to occupy. General ideals used to dominate literature. They have been driven out by the cry of "art for art's sake." General ideals used to dominate politics.They have been driven out by the cry of "efficiency," which may roughly be translated as "politics for politics' sake."Persistently for the last twenty years the ideals of order or liberty have dwindled in our books; the ambitions of wit and eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments. Literature has purposely become less political; politics have purposely become less literary.General theories of the relation of things have thus been extruded from both; and we are in a position to ask, "What have we gained or lost by this extrusion? Is literature better, is politics better,for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?"

When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when aman's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health.Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world.And there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency of a nation than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of the world, a journey to the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem.There can be no stronger sign of a coarse material health than the tendency to run after high and wild ideals; it is in the first exuberance of infancy that we cry for the moon.None of the strong men in the strong ages would have understood what you meant by working for efficiency. Hildebrand would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but for the Catholic Church.Danton would have said that he was working not for efficiency,but for liberty, equality, and fraternity. Even if the ideal of such men were simply the ideal of kicking a man downstairs,they thought of the end like men, not of the process like paralytics.They did not say, "Efficiently elevating my right leg, using,you will notice, the muscles of the thigh and calf, which are in excellent order, I--" Their feeling was quite different.They were so filled with the beautiful vision of the man lying flat at the foot of the staircase that in that ecstasy the rest followed in a flash. In practice, the habit of generalizing and idealizing did not by any means mean worldly weakness.The time of big theories was the time of big results. In the era of sentiment and fine words, at the end of the eighteenth century, men were really robust and effective. The sentimentalists conquered Napoleon.The cynics could not catch De Wet. A hundred years ago our affairs for good or evil were wielded triumphantly by rhetoricians.Now our affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men.And just as this repudiation of big words and big visions has brought forth a race of small men in politics, so it has brought forth a race of small men in the arts. Our modern politicians claim the colossal license of Caesar and the Superman, claim that they aretoo practical to be pure and too patriotic to be moral; but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Chancellor of the Exchequer.Our new artistic philosophers call for the same moral license,for a freedom to wreck heaven and earth with their energy;but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Poet Laureate.I do not say that there are no stronger men than these; but will any one say that there are any men stronger than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion?Whether bondage be better than freedom may be discussed.But that their bondage came to more than our freedom it will be difficult for any one to deny.

The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in the strictly artistic classes. They are free to produce anything they like. They are free to write a "Paradise Lost"in which Satan shall conquer God. They are free to write a"Divine Comedy" in which heaven shall be under the floor of hell. And what have they done? Have they produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered bythe fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan schoolmaster? We know that they have produced only a few roundels. Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats themat their own irreverence. In all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell. And the reason is very obvious. Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.

Neither in the world of politics nor that of literature, then,has the rejection of general theories proved a success.It may be that there have been many moonstruck and misleading idealsthat have from time to time perplexed mankind. But assuredlythere has been no ideal in practice so moonstruck and misleadingas the ideal of practicality. Nothing has lost so many opportunitiesas the opportunism of Lord Rosebery. He is, indeed, a standingsymbol of this epoch--the man who is theoretically a practical man,and practically more unpractical than any theorist. Nothing in thisuniverse is so unwise as that kind of worship of worldly wisdom.A man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that raceis strong, of whether this cause or that cause is promising, is the manwho will never believe in anything long enough to make it succeed.The opportunist politician is like a man who should abandon billiardsbecause he was beaten at billiards, and abandon golf because he wasbeaten at golf. There is nothing which is so weak for workingpurposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory.There is nothing that fails like success.

And having discovered that opportunism does fail, I have been inducedto look at it more largely, and in consequence to see that it must fail.I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginningand discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each otherabout the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensiblethan the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act.For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness,and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy.But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religiousliberty without attempting to settle what is religion or whatis liberty. If the old priests forced a statement on mankind,at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid.It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformiststo persecute for a doctrine without even stating it.

For these reasons, and for many more, I for one have cometo believe in going back to fundamentals. Such is the generalidea of this book. I wish to deal with my most distinguishedcontemporaries, not personally or in a merely literary manner,but in relation to the real body of doctrine which they teach.I am not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a vivid artistor a vigorous personality; I am concerned with him as a Heretic--that is to say, a man whose view of things has the hardihoodto differ from mine. I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shawas one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive;I am concerned with him as a Heretic--that is to say, a man whosephilosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong.I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century,inspired by the general hope of getting something done.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something,let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire topull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages,is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid mannerof the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren,the value of Light. If Light be in itself good--" At this pointhe is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rushfor the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they goabout congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality.But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some peoplehave pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light;some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness,because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of alamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smashmunicipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something.And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes.So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day,there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all,and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light.Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now mustdiscuss in the dark.

Everyday in Grace

He is Risen!

Mówienie w co wierzysz jest bardziej zrozumiałe, niż powiedzieć "kalwinista"

Marcus Birro: Att älska är svårt

Humanists believe...

Repent for Your Environmental Sins!

What is the Gospel?

Be holy

Practical Implications of the Attributes of God

Practical Implications of the Incommunicable Attributes of God

Practical Implications of the Incommunicable Attributes of God

Practical Implications of the Communicable Attributes of God

Jesus Is God: Specific Examples Where Greek Theos (“God”) Is Applied to Jesus

Church Leaders Should Likewise Lead Lives That Are Examples to Imitate

Who Will Answer

John 8:36: So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

Hebrews 12:1, Calvin Commentaries

Förnuftets röst, äntligen

Lazy days

Per Gudmundson ställer en fråga till Robert Spencer

INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

Proverbs 25

ESV Study Bible: June 23, 2010

New Design

What would the devil say about your life?

Whose blessings?

Revive us, oh Lord

Some New Year Bible Readings

Merry Christmas!

Climate or power?

Taking a break

Interesting

If only I could...

The Certificate Program

Christian Dating- LaneCh & Susan Yenser

Tears of the Saints

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

Heb 10:19-25

Today's Devotionals

Do you remember?

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

Today's Devotionals

What does inerrancy mean? Is it essential to Christian belief?

How much do you know God?

The Narcissism Epidemic

David Livingstone, The Pathfinder of Africa

How not to / How to present the Gospel

Chesterton, Heretics, 10

Chesterton, Heretics, 9

Chesterton, Heretics, 8

Chesterton, Heretics, 7

Chesterton, Heretics, 6

Chesterton, Heretics, 5

Chesterton, Heretics, 4

Chesterton, Heretics, 3

Chesterton, Heretics, 2

Chesterton, Heretics, 1