I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones.... There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with the ideal, and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning thunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it.I have taught a book called Hope in Troubled Times to about 55 college juniors and seniors this year, and a great many of them are none to happy with the authors for pointing our how troubled our times are. There are not a few who think that the hope the authors speak of is unrealistic. They think it is unrealistic because they cannot do anything about it.
I have wallowed in this helplessness myself, but we need to remember that when you chart our position on the timeline of history it is a mere moment. It is also true that things did not have to be as they are now. Our moment could have been otherwise. There was no necessity in the nature of things that dictated our mistakes. We might have resisted our sins just as we may resist them now and turn.
Things will be different in the future and we can have a say, if we will pursue our ideals now. Jesus did not believe in mediocrity. His contemporaries thought he had a wild demon and his disciples thought he was defeated. Chesterton reminds us that just because a thing has been defeated does not mean it has been disproved. If we throw our ideals into the world a ripple will reach into eternity.
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