Monday, June 30, 2014

Advice To An Intelligent Child

Here is G.K. Chesterton's final advice to a very intelligent child.

"And don't believe in anything
That can't be told in colored pictures"


Ideas that are too insubstantial to illustrate are likely to be unreal abstractions or just mental muddles. Authentic insights are specific and so can be pictured in ways that help both to explain them and to verify them. And good mental pictures - models, to use the modern word - by involving that half of our mind which we call imagination, will take our understanding further than rational analysis on its own can ever go. This is evidently why Jesus taught in parables and why all communicators do well to cultivate a style of presentation that is as imaginative as it is analytical. So did writers like C.S.Lewis and preachers like C.H.Spurgeon."


J.I.Packer, Keep In Step With The Spirit, pg. 95

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