Our secular age argues that freedom is found in doing whatever we please. G.K. Chesterton illustrates why freedom is not found in the absence of restrictions.
We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were broken down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased. G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy, 153).
We might update Chesterton’s 20th century illustration to the current place we find ourselves in the West. Now — apart from any walls around civilization — people have decided to play with no regard for the naked peril of the precipice. And so, we see so many plunging over the side and into the precipice.
