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Unit 32: G.K. Chesterton-On Lying In Bed ...

perceives the immense difficulties that beset all family life, and he accepts them with immediate Notes
and unflinching loyalty, as essential parts of our human task. His views on patriotism belong to
the region of politics and do not concern us here. In regard to religion, he finds the modern school
amalgamating everything in characterless masses of generalities. They deny the reality of sin, and
in matters of faith generally they have put every question out of focus until the whole picture is
blurred and vague. He attacks this way of dealing with religion in one of his most amusing essays,
“The Orthodox Barber.” The barber has been sarcastic about the new shaving—presumably in
reference to M. Gillett’s excellent invention. “‘It seems you can shave yourself with anything—
with a stick or a stone or a pole or a poker’ (here I began for the first time to detect a sarcastic
intonation) ‘or a shovel or a—— ‘ Here he hesitated for a word, and I, although I knew nothing
about the matter, helped him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical vein. ‘Or a button-hook,’
I said, ‘or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram or a piston-rod——’ He resumed, refreshed with this
assistance, ‘Or a curtain-rod or a candlestick or a——’ ‘Cow-catcher,’ I suggested eagerly, and we
continued in this ecstatic duet for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told
me. He explained the thing eloquently and at length. ‘The funny part of it is,’ he said, ‘that the
thing isn’t new at all. It’s been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before.’” Mr. Chesterton
rejoins in a long and eloquent and most amusing sermon, the following extracts from which are
not without far-reaching significance.
“‘What you say reminds me in some dark and dreamy fashion of something else. I recall it
especially when you tell me, with such evident experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is
not really new. My friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of making everything
entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it shifts on to another.... It would be
nice if we could be shaved without troubling anybody. It would be nicer still if we could go
unshaved without annoying anybody—
“‘But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand, Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.
Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it under strange limitations,
and with painful conditions of pleasure.... But every now and then men jump up with the new
something or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice, that bad is good if you
are only enlightened, and that there is no real difference between being shaved and not being
shaved. The difference, they say, is only a difference of degree; everything is evolutionary and
relative. Shavedness is immanent in man.... I have been profoundly interested in what you have
told me about the New Shaving. Have you ever heard of a thing called the New Theology?’ He
smiled and said that he had not.”
In contrast with all this, it is Mr. Chesterton’s conviction that the facts must be unflinchingly and
in their entirety accepted. With characteristic courage he goes straight to the root of the matter and
begins with the fact of sin. “If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness
in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must
either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between
God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic
solution to deny the cat.” It is as if he said, Here you have direct and unmistakable experience. A
man knows his sin as he knows himself. He may explain it in either one way or another way. He
may interpret the universe accordingly in terms either of heaven or of hell. But the one unreasonable
and impossible thing to do is to deny the experience itself.
It is thus that he treats the question of faith all along the line. If you are going to be a Christian, or
even fairly to judge Christianity, you must accept the whole of Christ’s teaching, with all its
contradictions, paradoxes, and the rest. Some men select his charity, others his social teaching,
others his moral relentlessness, and so on, and reject all else. Each one of these aspects of the
Christian faith is doubtless very interesting, but none of them by itself is an adequate representation
of Christ. “They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and
they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness. They have parted
His garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without
seam, woven from the top throughout.”

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