Back in Athens, with a bit of Chesterton

I'm back in Athens again, puttering about the hermitage, setting things in order for the coming semester. This will be a good one, I think: a couple of classes promise interesting challenges, and my own teaching duties present their own peculiar problems and satisfactions. I've got some domestic projects I hope to get done this semester: I've finally realized I'm going to be here for a while yet, so I might as well make this place homey. But more on all that later, and now for a bit of Chesterton. This is from his book The Thing, in a chapter titled "The Outline of the Fall." I don't agree with all of it--I think Chesterton, like Lewis, reasons beyond the evidence at times--but here's one bit I find very good indeed:

The Fall is a view of life. It is not only the only enlightening, but the only encouraging view of life. It holds, as against the only real alternative philosophies, those of the Buddhist or the Pessimist or the Promethean, that we have misused a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one. It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will. Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate. A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not a word to say. For instance, on the colossal contrast between the completeness of man's machines and the continued corruption of his motives; on the fact that no social progress really seems to leave self behind; on the fact that the first and not the last men of any school or revolution are generally the best and purest; as William Penn was better than a Quaker millionaire or Washington better than an American oil magnate; on that proverb that says: "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance," which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin; on those extremes of good and evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans and sceptics: "We look before and after, and pine for what is not"; which cries against all prigs and progressives out of the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory; and that we are all kings in exile.

The whole book may be found in etext here.