Apologetics; Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936
The world is round, so round that the schools of optimism and pessimism
have 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 and
evil are mingled in roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly from
the 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 they
appear 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 a
thing very like many new religions. Such a blend is often something
much worse than any one creed taken separately, even the creed of the
Thugs. The error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is really
the good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion.
And this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who have the
misfortune to think of some religion or other, that the parts commonly
counted good are bad, and the parts commonly counted bad are good.
It is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group, but to admire
it in a photographic negative. It is difficult to congratulate all
their 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 energy of the
nineteenth century. Take the Salvation Army and the philosophy of
Auguste Comte.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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