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Orthodoxy

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Orthodoxy

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To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will.

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives.

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

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.

Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy.

It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything— even pride.

For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything.

One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.

We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it. We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor.

This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.

Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.

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