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Dull as Ditch-Water

In short, I have experienced the mere excitement of existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as ditch-water. And by the way, is ditch-water dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.

G.K. Chesterton, The Spice of Life, from In Defense of Sanity p. 379

So it turns out ditch-water isn’t so dull. The same can be said for watching paint dry. Need proof? Watch THIS and read HERE. Chesterton believed that the rising generation of his day was losing the ability to enjoy the small things in life and the ability to be amused within themselves. Technology was making more and more noise, but the soul was losing the ability to deal with itself and find amusement within itself. I think he was right then, and that he is even more right at present.

This is the final essay of the collection, and it is one of the best. I will be sharing more quotes from it, but this may be my favorite.

Leaving Children on Doorsteps (G.K. Chesterton)

Chesterton says that the modern Western world sees the existence of children as a problem. How does the world then handle said problem? In several ways, one being the following:

The third way, which is unimpeachably Modern, is to imitate Rousseau, who left his baby on the door-step of the Foundling Hospital. It is true that, among the Moderns, it is generally nothing so human or traditional as the Foundling Hospital. The baby is to be left on the door-step of the State Department for Education and Universal Social Adjustment. In short, these people mean, with various degrees of vagueness, that the place of the Family can now be taken by the State.

He wrote that in 1932. He continues,

And if all the babies born in the world were left on the door-step of the Foundling Hospital, the Hospital, and the door-step, would have to be considerably enlarged.

Follow the logic. If it is the job of government to educate all children, then government cannot help but grow. He continues,

Now something like this is what has really happened, in the vague and drifting centralization of our time. The Hospital has been enlarged into the School and then into the State; not the guardian of some abnormal children, but the guardian of all normal children. Modern mothers and fathers, of the emancipated sort, could not do their quick-change acts of bewildering divorce and scattered polygamy, if they did not believe in a big benevolent Grandmother, who could ultimately take over ten million children by very grandmotherly legislation.

Did I mention he wrote this in 1932? He concludes,

Government grows more elusive every day. But the traditions of humanity support humanity; and the central one is this tradition of Marriage. And the essential of it is that a free man and a free woman choose to found on earth the only voluntary state; the only state which creates and which loves its citizens. So long as these real responsible beings stand together, they can survive all the vast changes, deadlocks, and disappointments which make up mere political history. But if they fail each other, it is as certain as death that ‘the State’ will fail them.

Marriage and the Modern Mind, from In Defense of Sanity, pp. 223-224.

Light Before Sun, Idea Before Incarnation

In an essay on Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton picks up an interesting line of thought. He notes the fact that the Book of Genesis records the creation of light occurring before the creation of the sun (Gen. 1:3-19).

To many modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the first leaf; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern thought, and like so many other ideas which are alien to most modern thought, it is a very subtle and very sound idea.

Chesterton then delivers this sound meditation on the creation narrative:

Whatever be the meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any man was oppressed.

Like Dorothy Sayers in The Mind of the Maker, he relates the idea to literature:

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as a mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book or before even the details or main features of the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he has thought of anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before he knows anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so frivolous as to take humour seriously – a maxim that a man should not laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them.

He continues,

The last page comes before the first; before his romance has begun, he knows that it has ended well. He sees the wedding before the wooing; he sees the death before the dual. But most of all he sees the colour and character of the whole story prior to any possible events in it.

(G.K. Chesterton on The Pickwick Papers, from In Defense of Sanity, pp. 127-128)

I do not know if there is a better illustration for the foreknowledge of God than the mind of the writer, the mind of the maker. I saw an interview with J.K. Rowling a while back in which she discussed how she first created the Harry Potter character. As she rode in a train, he essentially just appeared in her imagination, and she knew his destiny right away. C.S. Lewis wrote of his recurring vision of a fawn with an umbrella carrying parcels in the snow. They knew their own characters before they ever set pen to paper. God did too.

  • For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…(Rom. 8:29).

Or as one translation puts it:

  • For those on whom he set his heart beforehand, he did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son.

A Small Home is a Big Place

In his essay, Turning Inside Out, G.K. Chesterton makes a case for the central importance of education in the home, especially by mothers. The essay is quite timely. He sees a world in which education is seen as a grand task – so grand that it takes great experts and specialists to accomplish it. But he doesn’t think this is the way the world actually is:

Private education [i.e. education in the home] really is universal. Public education can be comparatively narrow. It would really be an exaggeration to say that the schoolmaster who takes his pupils in freehand drawing is training them in all the uses of freedom. It really would be fantastic to say that the harmless foreigner who instructs a class in French or German is talking with all the tongues of men and angels. But the mother dealing with her own daughters in her own home does literally have to deal with all forms of freedom, because she has to deal with all sides of a single human soul. She is obliged, if not to talk with the tongues of men and angels, at least to decide how much she shall talk about angels and how much about men.

In short, if education is really the larger matter, then certainly domestic life is the larger matter; and official or commercial life the lesser matter. It is a mere matter of arithmetic that anything taken from the larger matter will leave it less.

Hence his case for the massive, and massively important, role of mothers in the education of their children.

Modern Western societies would argue that in going out into the world, mothers are leaving the cramped, claustrophobic confines of a small house for the big wide world of freedom and advancement; or the small, tedious interaction with a child or two or three for ‘life out there’ to seek their fortunes on the market and with the masses. Chesterton says this line of thinking is wrong:

Every word that is said about the tremendous importance of trivial nursery habits goes to prove that being a nurse is not trivial. All tends to return of the simple truth that private work is the great one and the public work the small. The human house is a paradox, for it is larger inside than out.

His argument goes like this: society says that the State should be highly, maybe most highly, concerned with education. Mothers have the greatest opportunity to educate their children. And if these premises are true, then why on earth would the state want them separated from their children? That’s the argument (look up the essay to see it fleshed out), but that last quote is the takeaway for me.

When your children are at home, do not let them get the notion, and don’t get the notion yourself, that they are trapped in a small world. The home is, or at least should be, a place filled with God, the heavens, the stars and planets, human history, art, poetry, drama, story, love, joy, and much more. A small home should be a big place. And it ought to produce big people – who will, in turn, create their own small-big homes.

Quotes from the essay Turning Inside Out by G.K. Chesterton, from In Defense of Sanity.

On ‘On Lying in Bed’ by G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton, On Lying in Bed, from In Defense of Sanity, pp. 39-42. Read the essay online HERE.

This short essay by Chesterton is one of my favorites. In it, he meditates on the act of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. Many would consider this inactivity. But, considered rightly, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling should be an act. Chesterton ponders whether this was the very act that inspired Michelangelo in his work on that other famous ceiling.

This probably wasn’t the case, but it is a great thought nonetheless. Chesterton himself considers the great possibility of art on what may be the only extended blank surface in a house – the ceiling. I read the essay to my 7-year-old daughter and she immediately wanted to start painting the ceiling.

This is why I read Chesterton. I am a Reformed Protestant. He was, for a good part of his life, a Roman Catholic. I am a Calvinist. He was a staunch anti-Calvinist. He would probably dislike me immensely. But I love the man because of his imagination and wit. Because he can take mundane things and expose the fact that they are not mundane. A ceiling is not mundane. Lying on your back and staring at a ceiling does not have to be boring. In fact, it can be inspiring, depending on what your eyes can see via the imagination. A bored teenager sees his ceiling as a blank space that doesn’t compare to a computer screen. Michelangelo sees it as a canvas. A bored teenager sees walls as controlling borders. A child sees them as the holding place for adventure indoors. God sees them as a piece of paper to write, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin. God the graffiti-artist.

And beside his ruminations on ceilings themselves, and on art, Chesterton contributes some very solid reflections on the condition of the world. Though the essay was published in 1909, it is timely. He notes modern disdain for lying in bed. The world is too busy for such inactivity. He notes that early rising is no mark of greatness:

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man’s minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon.

The point is simple. The modern pharisees of the world are often of the sort that judge someone for the hour they rise, the type of food they eat, and the type of car they drive. They judge a man for his carbon footprint but do not care what foundation his feet are planted on. As I’ve heard Doug Wilson say, they will allow a woman to have an abortion, but malign her if she smokes while she is pregnant. They will praise her if she eats organic, but tear her down if that organic food makes her overweight. They build cities with no sidewalks and then demand that we walk three miles a day. To lay in bed and do nothing is atrocious, but to lay on the couch and text is the norm.

At the end, Chesterton gives his qualification for lying in bed:

…If you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.

He is giving us insight here into the world’s strange morality that will stamp all kinds of acts as virtuous if there is some scientific or popular fad surrounding them. Eating oats can become a virtue. Taking a certain vitamin can become a virtue. If Dr. Oz says the word, lying in bed could become the next great viral sensation.

Do what you do, first, because you are a human being. Next, do it out of conviction from first principles, that’s the point. Or else you will be tossed around ad infinitum from one morality to the other. God doesn’t care what you eat. He doesn’t tell you how long to sleep. He doesn’t tell you when to wake up or what breakfast to start your day with, or whether you should have breakfast at all. What he does tell you is to eat the book, that you do not live by bread alone, and that when you do lie down, as well as when you get up, to let that word dominate the conversation (Deut. 6:7).

The Strangest Telescope (G.K. Chesterton)

Chesterton pictures the martyrdom of an imaginary prophet:

…If we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.

Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope – the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt…

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself…It is a strange thing that men…have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.

(Introduction to the Defendant, from In Defense of Sanity, p. 2).

Does he overstate his case? Yes. It’s hyperbole. But the point is well taken, or at least should be.

One thing that has always set apart the great voices of Christianity, particularly the great preachers of the past 400 years, was their skill in doing precisely what Chesterton is writing about. They shine great lights on the earth. They have the power of the telescope that can magnify the earth. Jesus himself magnified the sparrow and salt and the vine and seeds and dirt and trees. The prophet can magnify the beauty of the earth and make you glad that you live in such a wonderland. But he can also show the ugliness of this world in striking ways. He can see the signs of the time. He can see the subtle sins and trends.

C.S. Lewis once pointed out that a fish doesn’t feel wet in the water. It is his world. It is all he knows. And in the same way man does not recognize his own situation. He thinks that it is what it is and can be no other. But the job of Christianity is to see the water amidst the water. To see the flood amidst the sea. To see materialism amidst a sea of materialism. To see technology worship as he looks at his iPad.

The problem is that we must look through our own eyes. If you want to examine yourself you have to look at yourself. But it is hard to look at yourself when you are within yourself. That would be like a telescope looking at itself.

We therefore need new eyes. And Jesus provides those eyes.

Persecution arises as one fish starts telling the other fish that they’re all wet. They think he’s crazy. But he’s actually right. And so they try to throw him out of the water.