See and Believe
Reading the highlighted passage below, I found it eye-opening that G.K. Chesterton’s book “Heretics”, written in 1905, reflects exactly what we are seeing in our modern world. It seems the sentiment of Chesterton’s generation, like ours, was “Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.” Some would have us believe that this non-defined good is a sufficient moral vision for our children. These same people think it good to deliver our children into a world of chaos that is collapsing under the frailty of moral relativism and the insane denial of truth.
In the name of progress, we are urged to refuse all suggestions of defining what we are progressing toward. The blind want us to become blind so that they can lead us into a bottomless pit of ever-increasing darkness. The difference between our generation and Chesterton’s is that what he saw as the sapling of the tree of modern progressive thinking, is now a tree in full bloom.
There was in Chesterton’s day a ray of light that still shown around this tree at least by reason of the moral majority, but today the night has come even where the sun shines, the majority is silent, and under the shadow of the tree the light is straining for comprehension.
Chesterton ends his book with these prophetic words announcing the progression from what was then toward what we see now. He warns us as follows…
“The great march for mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis to say that we are all in a dream; it will be mystical sanity to say we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to say that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe that stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet believed.”
We are (today)living in the reality of the second state of each of Chesterton’s predictions. Spiritual swords are being drawn to prove our very existence and the brave are those that see and still believe in the creation as it was created.