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

ours. But not the most confident of them all can equal the unswerving confidence of a madman. Notes
Sane people never wholly believe in themselves. They are liable to be influenced by the opinion of
others, and are willing to yield to the consensus of opinion of past or present thinkers. The lunatic
cares nothing for the views of others. He believes in himself against the world, with a terrific grip
of conviction and a faith that nothing can shake.
Mr. Chesterton applies his attack upon rationality to many subjects, with singular ingenuity. In
the question of marriage and divorce, for instance, the modern school which would break loose
from the ancient bonds can present their case with an apparently unassailable show of rationality.
But his reply to them and to all other rationalists is that life is not rational and consistent but
paradoxical and contradictory. To make life rational you have to leave out so many elements as to
make it shrink from a big world to a little one, which may be complete, but can never be much of
a world. Its conception of God may be a complete conception, but its God is not much of a God.
But the world of human nature is a vast world, and the God of Christianity is an Infinite God. The
huge mysteries of life and death, of love and sacrifice, of the wine of Cana and the Cross of
Calvary—these outwit all logic and pass all understanding. So for sane men there comes in a
higher authority. You may call it common sense, or mysticism, or faith, as you please. It is the
extra element by virtue of which all sane thinking and all religious life are rendered possible. It is
the secret spring of vitality alike in human nature and in Christian faith.
At this point it may be permissible to question Mr. Chesterton’s use of words in one important
point. He appears to fall into the old error of confounding reason with reasoning. Reason is one
thing and argument another. It may be impossible to express either human nature or religious
faith in a series of syllogistic arguments, and yet both may be reasonable in a higher sense. Reason
includes those extra elements to which Mr. Chesterton trusts. It is the synthesis of our whole
powers of finding truth. Many things which cannot be proved by reasoning may yet be given in
reason—involved in any reasonable view of things as a whole. Thus faith includes reason—it is
reason on a larger scale—and it is the only reasonable course for a man to take in a world of
mysterious experience. If the matter were stated in that way, Mr. Chesterton would probably
assent to it. Put crudely, the fashion of pitting faith against reason and discarding reason in favour
of faith, is simply sawing off the branch on which you are sitting. The result is that you must fall
to the ground at the feet of the sceptic, who asks, “How can you believe that which you have
confessed there is no reason to believe?” We have abundant reason for our belief, and that reason
includes those higher intuitions, that practical common sense, and that view of things as a whole,
which the argument of the mere logician necessarily ignores.
With this reservation, Mr. Chesterton’s position in regard to faith is absolutely unassailable. He is
the most vital of our modern idealists, and his peculiar way of thinking himself into his idealism
has given to the term a richer and more spacious meaning, which combines excellently the Greek
and the Hebrew elements. His great ideal is that of manhood. Be a man, he cries aloud, not an
artist, not a reasoner, not any other kind or detail of humanity, but be a man. But then that means,
Be a creature whose life swings far out beyond this world and its affairs—swings dangerously
between heaven and hell. Eternity is in the heart of every man. The fashionable modern gospel of
Pragmatism is telling us to-day that we should not vex ourselves about the ultimate truth of
theories, but inquire only as to their value for life here and now, and the practical needs which
they serve. But the most practical of all man’s needs is his need of some contact with a higher
world than that of sense. “To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.” In the
scale of differences between important and unimportant earthly things, it is the spiritual and not
the material that counts. “An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many men of science; but
in this matter their defect arises, not from ignorance of the other world, but from ignorance of this
world.” “The moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever
spoilt for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite; this

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