A Defence of Baby Worship
G. K. Chesterton
The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, the y are in consequence very
happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomab chools and sages have never
attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the
universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and
the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which
mark these human mushrooms we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was
on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.
There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the
common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as
a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will
support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energies and aspirations, may easily be convinced that it will find new things to appreciate; but it will
never be convinced, at bottom, that it has properly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is
still the new star we have not found that on which we were bom
But the influence of children goes further than its first trifting effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in
accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simple or ignorant) we do actually
treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous. The cynical philosopher
fancies he has a victory in this matter that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the child, so much admired by its worshippers, are
common enough. The fact is that this is precisely where baby. worship is so profoundly right. Any words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful,
the child's words and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the philosopher's words and antics are equally wonderful..