Giving 'old wives’ fables' a new hearing
I would always trust the old wives' fables against the old maids' facts.
The phrase has a pointed biblical counterpart. In the King James Version, 1 Timothy 4:7 tells Timothy to refuse 'profane and old wives’ fables.' Chesterton instead makes the supposedly discredited storyteller preferable to a detached possessor of facts. This is a recognizable verbal echo, although the phrase’s availability as a familiar expression means that an intentional reversal of this particular verse cannot be proved from the wording alone. 1 Timothy 4:1–8, KJV
The distinction matters: the biblical passage does not dismiss all stories, all inherited wisdom, or all women’s testimony. Its surrounding warning concerns departure from the faith and teachings that prohibit marriage and certain foods. Chesterton’s immediate contrast concerns whom to trust: participants in ordinary life or the literary class to which he admits belonging. Reading his sentence as a considered rejection of the epistle would therefore confuse two different targets. Nor does the shared phrase identify a unique translation: the inspected Douay–Rheims electronic witness also has 'old wives fables,' while rendering the opening injunction differently. Douay–Rheims, 1 Timothy 4:7
The domestic vocabulary also leads forward. The juxtaposition of wives, maids and 'mother wit' makes experience of ordinary family life the rhetorical test of intelligence; it is a deliberately gendered joke, rather than evidence about any named unmarried critic. Shortly afterwards the nurse becomes the bearer of both popular tradition and fairy tales. The point is not yet that any popular belief has been demonstrated true: Chesterton explicitly presents his preference as a personal bias before his theoretical beginnings. It explains why nursery stories will receive a hearing in the philosophical argument that follows. Orthodoxy, IV, paragraphs beginning 'I have first to say' and 'My first and last philosophy'
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