The meek have something to inherit
The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.
The wording recalls the beatitude, ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5:5, King James Version). Chesterton changes the future promise into an emphatic present assertion: they do inherit. His joke depends on accepting the promise while denying that indiscriminate intellectual self-distrust is the meekness it blesses. The inheritance becomes, in this chapter's argument, the capacity to know and affirm something.
The beatitude also has a close scriptural antecedent in Psalm 37:7–11: patient trust in the Lord, restraint from anger, and the meek inheriting the earth belong together. Neither passage describes uncertainty about whether knowledge is possible. That contextual difference gives Chesterton's reversal its force; it does not make his defence of intellectual conviction the explicit subject of the biblical verses. The inspected witness is Project Gutenberg's modern electronic KJV text, not a facsimile of an early printing; the verbal resemblance alone cannot establish which Bible edition Chesterton used.
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