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Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936

"Orthodoxy"


The only question is whether all terms are useless, or whether one can,
with such a phrase, cover a distinct IDEA about the origin of things.
I think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would
not talk about evolution. And the root phrase for all Christian
theism was this, that God was a creator, as an artist is a creator.
A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it
as a little thing he has "thrown off." Even in giving it forth he
has flung it away. This principle that all creation and procreation
is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the
evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out. A woman
loses a child even in having a child. All creation is separation.
Birth is as solemn a parting as death.
It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that
this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet
from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true
description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world.
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it.


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