More Than Stone

I have often wondered if my theology is venturing into heresy. Then a friend sent me this quote from G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy. I must confess, I haven’t read the book, but I do love the quote.

“I am the fool of this story . . . I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all the other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the age. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. . . but I have discovered , not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion . . . I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.”