The Catholic Church and conversionChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Catholic Church and conversion
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Conversion -- Catholic Church
When the convert has once seen the world like that, with one balance of
ideas and a number of other ideas that have left it and lost their
balance, he does not in fact experience any of the inconveniences that
he might reasonably have feared before that silent but stunning
revolution. He is not worried by being told that there is something in
Spiritualism or something in Christian Science. He knows there is
something in everything. But he is moved by the more impressive fact
that he finds everything in something. And he is quite sure that if
these investigators really are looking for everything, and not merely
looking for anything, they will be more and more likely to look for it
in the same place. In that sense he is far less worried about them than
he was when he thought that one or other of them might be the only
person having any sort of communication with the higher mysteries and
obviously rather capable of making a mess of it. He is no more likely to
be overawed by the fact that Mrs. Eddy achieved spiritual healing or Mr.
Home achieved bodily levitation than a fully dressed gentleman in Bond
Street would be overawed by the top-hat on the head of a naked savage. A
top-hat may be a good hat but it is a bad costume. And a magnetic trick
may be a sufficient sensation but it is a very insufficient philosophy.
He is no more envious of a Bolshevist for making a revolution than of a
beaver for making a dam; for he knows his own civilisation can make
things on a pattern not quite so simple or so monotonous. But he
believes this of his civilisation and his religion and not merely of
himself. There is nothing supercilious about his attitude; because he is
well aware that he has only scratched the surface of the spiritual
estate that is now open to him. In other words, the convert does not in
the least abandon investigation or even adventure. He does not think he
knows everything, nor has he lost curiosity about the things he does not
know. But experience has taught him that he will find nearly everything
somewhere inside that estate and that a very large number of people are
finding next to nothing outside it. For the estate is not only a formal
garden or an ordered farm; there is plenty of hunting and fishing on it,
and, as the phrase goes, very good sport.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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