Chesterton On The Wonder of Life

A child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh, free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect...He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation.

He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing, and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world.

People who prefer the mechanical pleasures to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated, and exhausted things of our dying capitalist civilization, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilizations.