Saturday, March 20, 2010

"The Next Great Heresy" quote

People have been hunting for a certain quote recently, and I thought perhaps it would be useful to give it with some of its context.
--Dr. Thursday


The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back... The roots of the new heresy, God knows, are as deep as nature itself, whose flower is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. I say that the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times; cannot see even the skysigns in the street that are the new sort of signs in heaven. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan - but most of what was in Broadway is already in Piccadilly.
[GKC, G. K.’s Weekly, June 19, 1926; quoted in Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox, 123]

2 comments:

  1. Chesterton's perspicacity was simply uncanny. I'm just finished reading a book called Modern Physics, Ancient Faith by Stephen Barr, a Catholic physicist. He devotes a chapter to the computer metaphor of mind, in which he quotes the "suicide of thought" section of Orthodoxy. It's amazing to me that Chesterton could be contributing to a discussion of AI seven decades after he died. Of course, he was spot on in the above quote, too.

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  2. yes an uncanny insight ..definitely a man who could read the times!

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