Daily death and a second birth
We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics.
Two New Testament formulas are brought into the same comic sequence. ‘We die daily’ closely recalls Paul's ‘I die daily’ in 1 Corinthians 15:31 (King James Version). Paul's immediate subject is the danger endured by the apostles, within an argument for resurrection: if the dead do not rise, such exposure to death loses its justification (15:29–32). Chesterton transfers the phrase from a speaker's repeated jeopardy to a civilisation's repeated crises. 1 Corinthians 15.
‘Born again’ also recalls Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus in John 3:3–8. Nicodemus asks whether an old man can enter his mother's womb a second time; Jesus distinguishes birth of the flesh from birth of the Spirit. That exchange makes ‘obstetrics’ more pointed than a loose metaphor for novelty: Chesterton deliberately gives spiritual renewal a startlingly physical expression. These are probable biblical echoes rather than identified quotations. Neither passage teaches the special historical proposition that Europe alone repeatedly renews itself; the scriptural language supplies the pattern through which Chesterton interprets that proposition. The wording compared is the King James Version, first published in 1611, inspected in Project Gutenberg's electronic transcription.
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