The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
In plain words, this sort of theory is a blasphemy against
the intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder as well as
a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial
explanation when there is obviously a human explanation.
It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a
quadruped was the reason of my sitting on a chair with four legs.
I answer that I do it because I foresee that there may be grave
disadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg. Or it is as if I
were told that I liked to swim in the sea, solely because some early
forms of amphibian life came out of the sea on to the shore.
I answer that I know why I swim in the sea; and it is because
the divine gift of reason tells me that it would be unsatisfactory
to swim on the land. In short this sort of vague evolutionary
theorising simply amounts to finding an unconvincing explanation
of something that needs no explanation. And the case is really quite
as simple with great political and religious movements by which man
has from time to time changed the world in this or that respect
in which he happened to think it would be the better for a change.
The Crusade was a religious movement, but it was also a perfectly
rational movement; one might almost say a rationalist movement.
I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying that such a campaign for
a creed was immoral; and indeed it often has been, and now perhaps
generally is, quite horribly immoral. But when he implies that it
is irrational he has selected exactly the thing which it is not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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