The Catholic Church and conversionChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Catholic Church and conversion
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Conversion -- Catholic Church
I will add one example to illustrate this point, because it leads us on
to larger matters. After a long time—I might almost say after a
lifetime—I have at last begun to realise what the worthy Liberal or
Socialist of Balham or Battersea really means when he says he is an
Internationalist and that humanity should be preferred to the narrowness
of nations. It dawned on me quite suddenly, after I had talked to such a
man for many hours, that of course he had really been brought up to
believe that God’s Englishmen were the Chosen Race. Very likely his
father or uncle actually thought they were the lost Ten Tribes. Anyhow,
everything from his daily paper to his weekly sermon assumed that they
were the salt of the earth, and especially that they were the salt of
the sea. His people had never thought outside their British nationality.
They lived in an Empire on which the sun never set, or possibly never
rose. Their Church was emphatically the Church of England—even if it was
a chapel. Their religion was the Bible that went everywhere with the
Union Jack. And when I realised that, I realised the whole story. That
was why they were excited by the exceedingly dull theory of the
Internationalist. That was why the brotherhood of nations, which to me
was a truism, to them was a trumpet. That was why it seemed such a
thrilling paradox to say that we must love foreigners; it had in it the
divine paradox that we must love enemies. That was why the
Internationalist was always planning deputations and visits to foreign
capitals and heart-to-heart talks and hands across the sea. It was the
marvel of discovering that foreigners had hands, let alone hearts. There
was in that excitement a sort of stifled cry: “Look! Frenchmen also have
two legs! See! Germans have noses in the same place as we!” Now a
Catholic, especially a born Catholic, can never understand that
attitude, because from the first his whole religion is rooted in the
unity of the race of Adam, the one and only Chosen Race. He is loyal to
his own country; indeed he is generally ardently loyal to it, such local
affections being in other ways very natural to his religious life, with
its shrines and relics. But just as the relic follows upon the religion,
so the local loyalty follows on the universal brotherhood of all men.
The Catholic says, “Of course we must love all men; but what do all men
love? They love their lands, their lawful boundaries, the memories of
their fathers. That is the justification of being national, that it is
normal.” But the Protestant patriot really never thought of any
patriotism except his own. In that sense Protestantism is patriotism.
But unfortunately it is only patriotism. It starts with it and never
gets beyond it. We start with mankind and go beyond it to all the varied
loves and traditions of mankind. There never was a more illuminating
flash than that which lit up the last moment of one of the most glorious
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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