As I continue reading Chesterton’s Heritics / Orthodoxy I am getting the sense that Chesterton was the early 1900′s version of Dr. Albert Mohler. I mean by this that both men are very acutely aware of what is going on in the culture, how it has gotten to where it is and where it will inevetably lead. This quote from the chapter “The Suicide of Thought” is very descriptive, and in a way very prophetic of where we are today. Enjoy (Bold added for emphasis):
…What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt – the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. 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.
At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
We live in a time where men never doubt themselves while insisting that the Bible is anything but God’s inspired and inerrant Word. To claim that because we cannot know God and therefore cannot make claims to know what Scripture is saying, makes a person stop working…a poisonous humility. To accept the claim of Scripture, that it is God’s revealed Word, is to drive us to seek to know God through what He has revealed to us.
