# A youthful Father and an ageless creator

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH04.P025](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH04.P025/#char=2168,2197): "our Father is younger than we"

‘Younger’ names undiminished delight, not a date of birth for God. The surrounding comparison makes human fatigue the measure that fails: God's constancy might express inexhaustible activity.

Augustine offers both a parallel and a qualification in *Confessions* I.4.4: God is ‘never new, never old’ and ‘always working, yet ever at rest.’ The same prayer combines divine changelessness with the renewal and sustenance of creatures. In this comparison, Chesterton's youthful creator is consonant with God's immunity to exhaustion, but the daily command to repeat creation need not mean that God acquires fresh intentions in time. Augustine's language explicitly resists measuring God by creaturely aging.

The witness inspected is New Advent's revised presentation of J. G. Pilkington's English translation in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, first series, volume 1 (1887); this is a translation witness, not Augustine's late-fourth-century Latin wording. The parallel illuminates Chesterton's metaphor without establishing borrowing. [Augustine, *Confessions* I.4.4](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110101.htm).

## Sources

- [Augustine, Confessions, Book I](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110101.htm), Chapter 4, §4; source statement identifies Pilkington translation, NPNF I.1 (1887), revised by Kevin Knight

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