Dale Ahlquist, the president and co-founder of the American Chesterton Society, is the creator and host of the Eternal Word Television Network series, "G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense." He wrote an essay today on the Blog of Crisis Magazine, entitled: Sin and Purity.
Drawing on Chesterton in his essay, Ahlquist tells us: It should not be that difficult to understand what purity is, and that when we talk about purity, we mean something that has not been befouled by something that befouls, namely sin. There is something all-or-nothing about purity. Purity needs to be completely pure to get itself so called. A little purity does not go very far. A teaspoon of clean water does not purify a tall glass of sewage, but a teaspoon of sewage utterly ruins a glass of clean water. But physical cleanliness should not be confused with moral purity. As Chesterton says, “Saints can afford to be dirty, but seducers have to be clean.”… Though the modern world seems utterly mystified by the ideal (purity), Chesterton points out that there is an unconscious acknowledgement of it in the modern worship of children, and,
Here's the quote:
Why else would anyone “worship a thing merely because it is small and immature?”It is because we value purity.
