We meet tonight at 7pm. Beside the previous post, I should mention that a church many of us hail from (Trinity Covenant Church in Aptos) is praying for the opening of the Forty Days for Life in Watsonville. The Forty Days for Life prays to end abortion. Some may even be fasting, so I thought I'd have a bit more snacks than usual for any who wish to break the fast this evening. You are free, as always, to bring anything you wish.
In case there was any doubt, Chesterton was decidedly against abortion long before it had set in as it has today. He generally attacked it at the roots of eugenics and Christian doctrine.
In Eugenic and Other Evils, Chesterton writes on the persecution of the beggarly in his land:
"The game laws have taken from him his human command of Nature. The mendicancy laws have taken from him his human demand on Man. There is one human thing left it is much harder to take from him. Debased by him and his betters, it is still something brought out of Eden, where God made him a demigod: it does not depend on money and but little on time. He can create in his own image. The terrible truth is in the heart of a hundred legends and mysteries. As Jupiter could be hidden from all-devouring Time, as the Christ Child could be hidden from Herod—so the child unborn is still hidden from the omniscient oppressor. He who lives not yet, he and he alone is left; and they seek his life to take it away."
Here is a nice turn against the idea that Christians today need to be more broad minded on issues like these since times have changed:
"Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense . . . becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding to no form of creed and contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded" (from Heretics).
Here is Chesterton waxing paradoxically wonderful: "The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and secondly, that they are in consequence very happy" (from the essay "In Defence of Baby Worship” from The Defendant, 1903).
