"GKChesterton-TheSuperstitionOfDivorce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chesterton G.K)

kiss on the mere book alters the moral quality of perjury. Yet this is
precisely what is implied in saying that formal re-marriage alters the
moral quality of conjugal infidelity. It may have been a mark of the
Dark Ages that Harold should swear on a relic, though he were afterwards
forsworn. But surely those ages would have been at their darkest, if he
had been content to be sworn on a relic and forsworn on another relic.
Yet this is the new altar these reformers would erect for us, out of the
mouldy and meaning less relics of their dead law and their dying
religion.

Now we, at any rate, are talking about an idea, a thing of the intellect
and the soul; which we feel to be unalterable by legal antics. We are
talking about the idea of loyalty; perhaps a fantastic, perhaps only an
unfashionable idea, but one we can explain and defend as an idea. Now I
have already pointed out that most sane men do admit our ideal in such a
case as patriotism or public spirit; the necessity of saving the state
to which we belong. The patriot may revile but must not renounce his
country; he must curse it to cure it, but not to wither it up. The old
pagan citizens felt thus about the city; and modern nationalists feel
thus about the nation. But even mere modern internationalists feel it
about something; if it is only the nation of mankind. Even the
humanitarian does not become a misanthrope and live in a monkey-house.
Even a disappointed Collectivist or Communist does not retire into the
exclusive society of beavers, because beavers are all communists of the
most class-conscious solidarity. He admits the necessity of clinging to
his fellow creatures, and begging them to abandon the use of the
possessive pronoun; heart-breaking as his efforts must seem to him after
a time. Even a Pacifist does not prefer rats to men, on the ground that
the rat community is so pure from the taint of Jingoism as always to
leave the sinking ship. In short, everybody recognises that there is
some ship, large and small, which he ought not to leave, even when he
thinks it is sinking.

We may take it then that there are institutions to which we are attached
finally; just as there are others to which we are attached temporarily.
We go from shop to shop trying to get what we want; but we do not go
from nation to nation doing this; unless we belong to a certain group
now heading very straight for Pogroms. In the first case it is the
threat that we shall withdraw our custom; in the second it is the threat
that we shall never withdraw ourselves; that we shall be part of the
institution to the last. The time when the shop loses its customers is
the time when the city needs its citizens; but it needs them as critics
who will always remain to criticise. I need not now emphasise the deadly
need of this double energy of internal reform and external defence; the
whole towering tragedy which has eclipsed our earth in our time is but
one terrific illustration of it. The hammer-strokes are coming thick and
fast now; and filling the world with infernal thunders; and there is
still the iron sound of something unbreakable deeper and louder than all
the things that break. We may curse the kings, we may distrust the
captains, we may murmur at the very existence of the armies; but we know