Wise Words on Wednesday: A Skeptical World

“For the secular society of today is skeptical not merely about spiritual assumptions, but about its own secular assumptions. It has not merely broken the church window or besieged the tower of tradition; it has also kicked away the ladder of progress by which it had climbed.

The Declaration of Independence, once the charter of democracy, begins by saying that certain things are self-evident. If we were to trace the history of the American mind from Thomas Jefferson to William James, we should find that fewer and fewer things were self-evident, until at last hardly anything is self-evident.

So far from it being self-evident to the modern that men are created equal, it is not self-evident that men are created, or even that men are men.”

– G.K. Chesterton, 1926