The Everlasting ManChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Everlasting Man
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Catholic Church -- Apologetic works; Christianity and other religions; Religion
The Church Militant is thus unique because it is an army marching to
effect a universal deliverance. The bondage from which the world is thus
to be delivered is something that is very well symbolised by the state
of Asia as by the state of pagan Europe. I do not mean merely their
moral or immoral state. The missionary, as a matter of fact, has much
more to say for himself than the enlightened imagine, even when he says
that the heathen are idolatrous and immoral. A touch or two of realistic
experience about Eastern religion, even about Moslem religion, will
reveal some startling insensibilities in ethics; such as the practical
indifference to the line between passion and perversion. It is not
prejudice but practical experience which says that Asia is full of
demons as well as gods. But the evil I mean is in the mind. And it is in
the mind wherever the mind has worked for a long time alone. It is what
happens when all dreaming and thinking have come to an end in an
emptiness that is at once negation and necessity. It sounds like an
anarchy, but it is also a slavery. It is what has been called already
the wheel of Asia; all those recurrent arguments about cause and effect
or things beginning and ending in the mind, which make it impossible for
the soul really to strike out and go anywhere or do anything. And the
point is that it is not necessarily peculiar to Asiatics; it would have
been true in the end of Europeans--if something had not happened. If the
Church Militant had not been a thing marching, all men would have been
marking time. If the Church Militant had not endured a discipline, all
men would have endured a slavery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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