G. K. Chesterton’s Obiter Dicta

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 6, 8 February 1923, Page 15

G. K. Chesterton’s Obiter Dicta

kvil always takes advantage of ambiguity. Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes. There has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin. A silent anarchy is eating out our society. The State has suddenly and quickly gone mad. It is talking nonsense, and it can’t stop. The fairy tales knew what the modern mystics don’t—that one should not let loose either the supernatural or the natural.

The Eugenists are as passive in their statements as they are active in their experiments. Modern scientists will not say that George 111. in his lucid intervals should settle who is mad; or that the aristocracy that introduced gout shall supervise diet. The newspaper of to-day—which every day can .be delivered earlier and earlier—every day is less worth delivering at all.

The age we live in is something more than an age of superstition—it is an age of innumerable superstitions. The thing that really is trying to tyrranise through government is science.

' , The doctor of science actually boasts that he will always abandon a hypothesis and yet he persecutes for the hypothesis. ’

The Eugenists mean that the public is to be given up, not as a heathen land for conversion, but simply as a pabulum for experiment.

There is no reason in Eugenics but there is plenty of motive.

The epoch for which it is almost impossible to find a form of words is our own.

The half-starved English proletarian is not only nearly a skeleton, but he is a skeleton in a cupboard. Our sins (of the past) have become out secrets.