Words Worth Noting - January 26, 2023

“Sex… is really a very solemn act; For it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we know as human society. Some groping in these dark beginnings have said that mankind was once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under a matriarchy it would not be called mankind but womankind. But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible. Then came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide what he had created. So he became the head of the family, not as a bully with a big club to beat women with, but rather as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person. Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been the first family act, and it would still be true that man then for the first time acted like a man, and therefore the for the first time became fully a man.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Professors and Prehistoric Men” in The Everlasting Man, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)