The Course of Conversion, IV
Chesterton, G. K.
November 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 7 THE COURSE OF CONVERSION IV. THE NEWER GENERATION By G. K. CHESTERTON WHEN the convert has...
...Living in a world where he is free to do anything, even to go to the devil, he does not see why he should tie himself to the wheel of a mere destiny...
...For instance, it is perfectly natural that they should want to act naturally...
...But he is moved by the more impressive fact that he finds everything in something...
...but then so does the cosmos of the Clapham set or the Clapton Agapomene...
...Vitus's dance, signalizes his healthy state by sitting absolutely still like a stone...
...Home achieved bodily levitation than a fully dressed gentleman in Bond Street would be overawed by the top-hat on the head of a naked savage...
...It has now entirely disappeared...
...In some muddled way, people have confused the natural remarks of converts, about having found moral peace, with some idea of their having found mental rest, in the sense of mental inaction...
...He knows there is something in everything...
...The dogmatic anarchism of the middle of the nineteenth century is not the creed they hold, or even the excuse they offer...
...In other words, the convert does not in the least abandon investigation or even adventure...
...that the conversion I understand is that of the pagan and not the Puritan...
...they want to have their own way, a much more intelligible desire...
...Aldous Huxley, and of many others...
...For that is the very simple explanation of the affair...
...The Catholic convert finds himself for the first time with a starting-point for straight and strenuous thinking...
...To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think...
...It has not had another...
...The rising generation sees the real issue...
...But I should not imagine any divinity that was sufficiently divine...
...but only quarrels about that one...
...Recovering his health means recovering his power of moving in the right way as distinct from the wrong way...
...He has for the first time a way of testing the truth in any question that he raises...
...But the very laws of life are against the endurance of a revolt that rests on nothing but natural passion...
...It barely lasted from the time of Voltaire to the time of Huxley...
...They do not know that he has not gone into the inner darkness, but out into the broad daylight...
...Christianity was larger...
...On the height of that ancient empire and that international experience, humanity had a vision...
...or the Nietzschean theory that nature is evolving something with superior claims to our own...
...but he will probably move a great deal more than before...
...But there can be but one end to a war between a solid and a scattered army...
...THE NEWER GENERATION By G. K. CHESTERTON WHEN the convert has once seen the world like that, with one balance of ideas and a number of other ideas that have left it and lost their balance, he does not, in fact, experience any of the inconveniences that he might reasonably have feared before that silent but stunning revolution...
...The outsiders stand by and see, or think they see, the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber...
...I certainly would not go to any of those little social sects which only express one idea at a time, because that idea happens to be fashionable at the moment...
...There was, indeed, a brief period when a small minority did some hard thinking on the heathen or heretical side...
...He knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which is labeled as being very large...
...There is nothing supercilious about his attitude...
...For this is one o.f the very queerest of the common delusions about what happens to the convert...
...In that sense, he is far less worried about them than he was when he thought that one or other of them might be the only person having any sort of communication with the higher mysteries and obviously rather capable of making a mess of it...
...and all else has been comparatively small...
...I have much more sympathy with the person who leaves the Church for a love affair than with one who leaves it for a long-winded German theory to prove that God is evil or that children are a sort of morbid monkey...
...But they do not maintain anything like a contrary system of spiritual citizenship, or moral responsibility...
...a machine that must be scoured as clean 8 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 of all spirits as if it were the avowed machine of materialism...
...One of them is labeled agnostic...
...They might as well say that a man who has completely recovered his health, after an attack of palsy or St...
...In living in a world with two orders, the supernatural and the natural, the convert feels he is living in a larger world and does not feel any temptation to crawl back into a smaller one...
...and upon that antique conversion is founded the whole world that we know...
...Eddy achieved spiritual healing or Mr...
...He is no more envious of a Bolshevist for making a revolution than a beaver for making a dam...
...State to them any of the consistent theories of the supreme claim of nature upon us, such as the pantheistic idea of God in all natural things...
...Paganism was the largest thing in the world...
...but he knows by experience that it is only the same sort of wearisome wheel used for spiritual things instead of material tilings...
...If they are anarchical, they are not anarchist...
...What is now called free thought is valued, not because it is free thought, but because it is freedom from thought...
...It is a transformation far more vast and tremendous than anything that has been meant for many years past, at least in England and America, by a sectarian controversy or a doctrinal division...
...at what stage of his external exasperation he will start up and say he can bear it no more...
...But the result is that they are, after all, at a disadvantage in face of those other young people who have satisfied their reason by a scheme that makes the universe reasonable...
...Each of them professes to be a complete cosmos or scheme of all things...
...I do not say it in contempt...
...Where should I go now, if I did leave the Catholic Church...
...but he knows by experience that it has not really even the freedom of ignorance...
...One of them is labeled theosophical or Buddhistic...
...Nothing is more notable, if we really study the characteristics of the rising generation, than the fact that they are not acting upon any exact and definite philosophy, such as those which have made the revolutions of the past...
...It is a wheel that must always go round without a single jolt of miraculous interruption—a circle that must not be squared by any higher mathematics of mysticism...
...But experience has taught him that he will find nearly everything somewhere inside that estate and that a very large number of people are finding next to nothing outside it...
...And he is quite sure that if these investigators really are looking for everything, and not merely looking for anything, they will be more and more likely to look for it in the same place...
...But each of these cosmic systems or machines seems to him much smaller and even much simpler than the broad and balanced universe in which he lives...
...and those who are ready for it rally, and those who are not ready for it scatter...
...but it would bring me back to the same problem in the end...
...Nothing is more amusing to the convert, when his conversion has been complete for some time, than to hear the speculations about when or whether he will repent of the conversion...
...That, at lesst, would be beginning all over again...
...but he knows that such humanitarians have really far less experience of humanity...
...As the world goes, especially at present, it is the other people, the heathens and the heretics, who seem to have every virtue except the power of connected thought...
...because he is well aware that he has only scratched the surface of the spiritual estate that is now open to him...
...I seem to know that weary return through the woodlands...
...They have a feeling, which is not unreasonable, that to commit themselves to the Catholic citizenship is to take responsibilities that continually act as restraints...
...He is not worried by being told that there is something in Spiritualism or something in Christian Science...
...For as I have tried to confess here without excessive egotism, I think I am the sort of man who came to Christ from Pan and Dionysus and not from Luther or Laud...
...and, at the worst, it will become a battle between bad Catholics and good Catholics, with the great dome over all...
...It is he who is, in the beautiful and beatific sense of the word, an outsider...
...So clear is this perception that I have sometimes put it to myself, as something between a melancholy meditation and a joke...
...In so far as there is really a succession among the young, it is but a part of the same process as that conversion of the young, of which I wrote in the first chapter...
...The best I could hope for would be to wander away into the woods and become, not a pantheist (for that is also a limitation and a bore) but rather a pagan, in the mood to cry out that some particular mountain peak or flowering fruit tree was sacred and a thing to be worshiped...
...for I think in some symbolic fashion I have walked that road before...
...If it was reasonable to have a sacred tree, it was not unreasonable to have a sacred crucifix...
...He does not want to go into a larger room, because he does not know of any larger room to go into...
...I know very well that if I went upon that journey, I should either despair or return...
...That is the moral of Mr...
...One of them is labeled humanitarian...
...for he knows his own civilization can make things on a pattern not quite so simple or so monotonous...
...And a magnetic trick may be a sufficient sensation but it is a very insufficient philosophy...
...But they do not want to act naturally according to any intellectual theory of the reliability of nature...
...because it is free thoughtlessness...
...but he is quite sure he would be cramped in any of them...
...But all they really know about it is that he has passed through a door...
...But he believes this of his civilization and his religion, and not merely of himself...
...On the contrary, their young and brilliant literary representatives are very prone to press upon us the crudity and cruelty of nature...
...He knows that they are thinking almost entirely of men as they are at this moment in modern cities, and have nothing like the huge human interest of what began by being preached to legionaries in Palestine and is still being preached to peasants in China...
...It is not a controversy between two philosophies, as was the Catholic and the Calvinist, or the Catholic and the materialist...
...It is a controversy between philosophers and philanderers...
...and that none of the trees would ever be a substitute for the real sacred tree...
...and they will almost certainly reject it as something unproved or exploded...
...He does not think he knows everything, nor has he lost curiosity about the things he does not know...
...They have a considerable negative revolt against religion, a negative revolt against negative morality...
...For all this is founded on that optical illusion about the outside and inside...
...They do not want to have an exact imitation of the laws of the physical universe...
...it is bound to change in its proportion with the coming of experience...
...He is no more likely to be overawed by the fact that Mrs...
...Paganism is better than pantheism, for paganism is free to imagine divinities, while pantheism is forced to pretend, in a priggish way, that all things are equally divine...
...A top-hat may be a good hat but it is a bad costume...
Vol. 5 • November 1926 • No. 1
