Authordoxy : being a discursive examination of Mr. G. K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy"

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AUTHORDoxr

AUTHORDOXY
BEING A DISCURS,IVE EXAMINATION
OF MR. G. !{. CHESTERTON'S "ORTHODOXY"
I By I
ALAN HANDSA CRE
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE CO
1PANY. MCMXXI

The Mayflo'lver Press. Plymouth England. William Brendon & Son. Ltd.

era MY WIFE

PREI/ufCE

HIS book is no more a serious exposi-
tion of Rationalism than Mr. Chester-
ton's Orthodoxy is a serious exposition
of Christianity. What he has a ttem pted to do
in that book is, he tells us, "in a vague and
personal way . . . to state the philosophy in
which I have come to believe." What I have
attempted to do in this book-which was
written during the war, and more because I
felt inclined to write it than because I wanted
to publish it-is to state by way of " a vague
and personal" commentary on Mr. Chester-
ton's volume why it has not converted me to
his philosophy.
Mr. Chesterton is all for the common people
against the specialist. Well, I am one of the
common people, and I have jotted down some
of the things that have occurred to me in the
course of reading his book.

A. H.

9

CONTENTS

Chapter Page
PREFACE 9
I. ON THE NEW ApOLOGIST . 15
II. IN DEFENCE OF SOMETHING ELSE 25
III. ON THE ROAD TO HANWELL 35
IV. THE MURDER OF THOUGHT 4 6
V. ON CASTLES IN THE AIR 55
VI. THE FLAG OF THE OTHER WORLD 66
VII. THE CHRISTIANITY OF PARADOXES 7 6
VIII. THE ETERNAL REPETITION. 88
IX. THE REALISM OF ORTHODOXY 99
x. REASON AND THE MIS-ADVENTURER 10 9

II

AUTHORDoxr

AUTHORDoxr

CHAPTER I-On tlte New Apologist

C HRISTIAN apologetics, strictly so
called, appear to have gone out of
fashion. It is the characteristic of
new fashions that they are generally old
fashions, and I am not without fear that we
may presently witness a revival of tedious
theological dialectics. But for the moment
the clergy have handed over the defence of
their professional interest to the journalists.
I t is a shrewd move to have made, for it is the
first business of a journalist to be interesting,
and, if the new apologist is less erudite than
his predecessor, he is a great deal more read-
able.
Further, the new apologist does battle in the
open. This is a very great advantage. The
pulpit is a coward's castle, in which a man is
secure from refutation in the face of his hearers.
Even when the parson ventures into print, it
does not advantage us much. For his defence
of religion will be read by persons who have
15

A
tthordoxy

never doubted it; and the criticisms of his
thesis will mostly be read by persons who have
already rejected it. But everyone-except
Mr. Balfour-reads the newspapers, and, when
religion is defended in their columns, and by a
layman, we feel free to enter with becoming
zest into the conflict.
Mr. G. K. Chesterton is indubitably the
chief of the journalistic apologists for Chris-
tianity. The book which is examined in these
pages may be regarded as a collected presenta-
tion of the points that its author has dealt
with in innumerable articles in the Press.
Before dealing with that book in some detail,
it may be well to try to form some estimate of
Mr. Chesterton's general method. I shall
state it in my own way, but I believe that it
will be admitted to be stated fairly.
The key-note of Mr. Chesterton's apologetic
is Catholicism, but the key-note of his position
is that he is not a Catholic in the only intelli-
gible sense of that word. He would, I think,
agree with Emerson that" the lesson of life is,
practically to generalize, to believe what the
years and the centuries say against the hours;
16

On the New Apologist

to resist the usurpation of particulars; to
penetra te to their catholic sense. " We shall
see with what consistency Mr. Chesterton acts
upon this soothing principle in his capacity as
an apologist for Christianity.
A Christian by profession, and a contro-
versialist by nature as well as by habit, Mr.
Chesterton could not have kept out of the
fight for the faith. Seeing his religion in a
rather bad way, not much impressed by the
case being pu t up for it by other people,
recognizing that it is possible to give people
too much of a bad thing, he seems to have
assured him
elf that this is no private fight,
and, having done so, entered boisterously into
the thick of it.
But his methods of fighting are new, at all
even ts to the theological arena. "Come on,
me fine fellows," he seems to say, " let us walk
as far as the Bull and Bush, drink a pint of ale,
and look into these matters." It cannot be
disputed that this is a more attractive invi-
tation than the announcement that the vicar
will preach on a forthcoming Sunday on the
fallacies of modern unbelief!

B

17

A uthordoxy

If we accompany Mr. Chesterton, we shall
have a very good time. But, unless we are
very dense, we shall not have walked far with
him before we discover what he is at. It is
something very like the confidence trick. He
knows all about us before he issues his invita-
tion. He does not know much about our
definite opinions, but he has taken care to
ascertain our pet aversions, and little odds and
ends of information about us that will enable
him to appear quite at home with our point
of view. He discovers, for example, that I
have a notion that Christianity is repressive,
that it lacks humanism, that it prefers to pre-
pare for the joys of what seems to me a very
disagreeable place called heaven rather than to
delight in the solid happiness of human life.
Knowing this, he gains my confidence at once
by his exuberant cheerfulness and hospitality.
Then his scheme is to turn the tables on me.
He will try to convince me that the real kill-
joy is the unbeliever; that the deadly, seriöus
people who never do silly things are the readers
of the Freethinker; and that the Christian is
the jolliest chap in the world.
18

On the New Apologist

Now there is a fatal delusion at the back of
this method of apologetics. It supposes that
a man cannot believe in facts without believing
in fads. It takes it for granted that to be critical
is to be cranky, and that to be a materialist is
to be miser a ble. I t is only the person who
does not detect these somewhat obtrusive
assumptions that will be misled by Mr.
Chesterton's genial enthusiasm for the Chris-
tian f ai the The un believers, according to
him, are

". . . them that do not have the faith,
And will not have the fun."

They are, literally, of the company to which
Mr. Chesterton, for all his rollicking, pro-
fesses to belong-" miserable sinners." Says
he:

" If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have crowned Neæra's curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
My house with dancing girls;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And to lecture rooms is forced,
Where his aunts, who are not married,
Demand to be divorced."

19

A uthordoxy

Personally I have never met a Rationalist
like this Higgins-I know many Christians who
might be mistaken for him-but I have no
dou bt that he exists. There are extraordinary
Ra tionalists like Higgins, just as there are
extraordinary Christians like Chesterton. No
one but Mr. Chesterton himself, however,
would perpetrate the assertion that there are
some four hundred millions of people in this
world of whom he is a typical specimen.
I t is clear that Mr. Chesterton cannot resist
the "usurpation of particulars." He is a
Christian, he likes beer; therefore, it is
Christian to like beer. Higgins is an Agnostic,
he has maiden a un ts of advanced opinions;
therefore, it is Agnosticism to have maiden
a un ts of advanced opinions! Of course there
is nothing particularly Christian in being fond
of beer. I am very fond of it myself. And
there is nothing essentially rationalistic in
being dragged to lectures by one's aunts.
But it is part of Mr. Chesterton's plan of
campaign to make a rule of the exceptions.
I might state the case the other way
round :

20

On the New Apologist

I f I had been a Christian,
And never had a dOll bt,
I'd have longed to get to heaven
And find its glory out;
But Higgins is a Christian,
And whenever he is ill,
He rushes to the doctor-
To be kept in N otting Hill.

This is quite as worthless as an attack on
Christianity as is Mr. Chesterton's rhyme as
an attack on Rationalism. They both dodge
the real issue, but, if I may be allowed to say
so, I think Mr. Chesterton's rhyme the more
unreasonable of the two. It is not so absurd
to think that Christians ought not to fear
death as to think that non-Christians are poor,
misera ble creatures tied to the apron-strings
of their aunts. The basis of l\1r. Chesterton's
apologetic is, however, more than an assump-
tion: it is a slander.
The old-fashioned apologist - like Dr.
Torrey-drew a lurid picture of the infidel
screaming for mercy on his death-bed, and
suggested that, if you had a Rationalist in the
house, you would be well advised to lock up
your silver. The unbeliever was represented
ZI

A uthordoxy

by him as of necessity a depraved character.
Now Mr. Chesterton serves up this grotesque
libel in a less repulsive fashion. The verse
which I have quoted above from his" Song of
the Strange Ascetic," if it means anything,
means this: that unbelief involves loss of
moral balance, looseness in the sexual relation,
and the selfish pursuit of personal pleasure.
If these things do characterize the Rationalist,
they are evidences of the evils of un belief. If
they do not characterize them, their absence
is also evidence of the evil of un belief! This
is typically Chestertonian and totally irrational.
If Mr. Chesterton will make out a list of the
people who during the last century or so have
been working to uplift and brighten the lives
of the people of England, he will find that the
unbelievers are in a majority, and he will find
that the attitude of the believers to their
efforts might be expressed by a parody of his
lines that I have quoted above:

". . . them that will not have the faith,
Shall never have the fun."

Also he will discover by a reference to criminal
22

On the New A1Jologist

statistics that most of the people in prisons are
believers. The superior altruism and morality
of the Christian is a delusion. And, if it be
answered that the Christian who is a criminal
is not a Christian, it may suffice to reply
that the Rationalist who is a roué is not a
Rationalist.
To sum up this introductory chapter, Mr.
Chesterton is a logician who endeavours to
obscure the falsity of his premises by the
extreme logicality of his arguments in their
support. He uses all his reasoning faculties to
prevent reasoning. "The road to hell is paved
with good intentions," says the proverb, but,
as a modern politician has remarked, the beauty
of the pavement does not improve the destina-
tion. It is not difficult to defend orthodoxy,
provided that you are not concerned a bou t the
consistency of the various parts of your defence
with each other. But the brilliance of your
inconsistency does not make it consistent.
Mr. Chesterton, who has said most things,
has said that to level against him the accusation
of brilliance is the last refuge of his critics " in
the final ecstasy of their anger." W ell, I am
23

A uthordoxy

not angry, and I say that, if the arguments of
Mr. Chesterton were put as crudely as they
are, in fact, put brilliantly, they would be
laughed out of court. As it is they are not
infrequently laughed into court.

24

CHAPTER II-In Defence of Something
Else

T HE first chapter of Orthodoxy is
entitled" In Defence of Everything
Else." I t suggests that the author
had an uneasy notion that the reader might
rise from a perusal of his book with the im-
pression that it stands in more need of a
defence than the theory it expounds-if,
indeed, it expounds any theory at all. As a
matter of fact, the only person who would
require a defence from Mr. Chesterton for any
book of his is the person who would not read
l\1r. Chesterton's defence of it if he wrote it.
:For most of us it does not in the least matter
what Mr. Chesterton means, for we are enter-
tained beyond measure by what he says.
Mr. Chesterton begins at the beginning.
He also finishes at the beginning, as we shall
presently observe. He begins by eXplaining
how Orthodoxy came to be written. It seems
that Mr. G. S. Street, in reviewing another
book of Mr. Chesterton's, said: "I will begin
25

A uthordoxy

to worry about my philosphy when Mr.
Chesterton has given us his." By that remark
Mr. Street" inspired and created this book."
In the next chapter we are given another
account of the origin of the volume before
us. I ts author was taking a walk with a pros-
perous publisher, and that gentleman said of
somebody: "That man will get on; he believes
in himself." The author thereupon had an
argumen t wi th the publisher, arising from
this remark-it will be examined in the next
chapter-and the publisher wound up by
asking: " Well, if a man is not to believe in
himself, in what is he to believe?" To which
IVIr. Chesterton replied, "I will go home and
write a book in answer to that question."
And, he tells us, "This is the book that I have
written in answer to it."
The author of a book ought to know by
whom or by what it was inspired. Mr.
Chesterton is the author of Orthodoxy, and he
has two opinions on the matter of its inspira-
tion. There is a certain consistency in this,
for he has two, or more, opinions on most
things. Weare left in a little doubt, however,
26

In Defence of Sometl
ing Else

as to \vhether this book was written to explain
l\1r. Chesterton's philosophy or to prove that
men should not believe in themselves. Unless
as I think there are some grounds for believing,
Mr. Chesterton's philosophy is that men
should not believe in themselves.
The first achievement of the creed or philo-
sophy called" Orthodoxy" is, our author tells
us, that it enables him" to be at home in the
world and yet astonished at it . . . to combine
an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome . . .
to be happy in this wonderland without once
being merely comfortable."
I t is very true that it is desirable to regard
life as an adventure, and that it is not desir-
able to get into a rut. But that is precisely
what Mr. Chesterton has done. Only he
a ppears to be under the impression that to
wriggle about fantastically in a rut is the same
thing as to get out of a rut. He wants to
make out that the agnostic is a stick-in-the-
mud, and he does it by proving as conclusively
as he proves anything that he is a stick-in-the-
mud himself. For, while most people who
discovered themselves to be stuck in the mud
27

A uthordoxy

would regard it as a very pleasant thing to get
clear of it, Mr. Chesterton seems to think it
a great achievement to have thought about
getting out of it, and a greater to have re-
mained more firmly fixed in it than ever. He
says: "What can be more glorious than to
brace oneself up to discover New South Wales
and then to realize, with a gush of happy
tears, that it was really old South Wales."
This seems to mean that the delight of life
consists more in the things we imagine than in
the things we experience: that anticipation is
better than realization, that the best way to
enjoy something you want is not to get it.
But, while it is true that many things fail to
come up to our expectations of them, I am free
to confess I have never found any delight in
that circumstance. If I had prepared myself
with some care for the beatific vision of the
New Jerusalem, I do not think I should be
moved to " a gush of happy tears" to find it
was Old Jewry. Serious as the consequences
may be for Mr. Chesterton's dialectic, it must
be admitted that it is impossible for a man to
be abroad and at home at the same time. It
28

In Defence of Something Else

is impossible to perceive any object in a man
bracing himself up to discover Sydney who has
no intention of putting a foot outside Swansea.
Nor is it at all clear why any man should be
moved to tears by the discovery that if he does
not shift his position he will remain standing
where he is.
I t is the main fallacy, as it is the first con-
tention, of Mr. Chesterton's view that a man
may have his cake and eat it too: that he may
enjoy the pleasures of feasting and the satis-
faction of fasting at one and the same moment.
The thing cannot be done, and that is all there
is to be said about it.
The combination of astonishment at the
world and a sense of being at home in it is a
strictly rational combination. The more we
are at home in the world, and the more we
know of its territories and of its people, the
more astonished we become at it. But there
are some people with whom one cannot feel
" at home." And there are some places in
which one cannot feel "at home." For
example, I doubt if Mr. Chesterton would feel
at home in the Rhondda Valley. If he were
29

A uthordoxy

to go and live there for a month, instead of
sustaining a " gush of happy tears" because
it is really old South Wales, he would shed
bitter tears of indignation because it is not
New South Wales. It is possible to find
enough of glad and sad surprise, of adventure,
of novelty, of mental and moral stimulus in
the things of every day, if only we will avoid
the notion that things are exciting in propor-
tion as they are remote or incomprehensible.
It is the Christian who says:
" I'm but a stranger here,
Heaven is my home,"

and misses all the fun of his temporary lodgings
in unprofitable speculation and dreaming as to
the character of the mansion that he is going
to move into by and by.
It is the Rationalist who says that the earth
is the only home that he knows of for mankind,
and proceeds to try to make it as comfortable
and as inspiring a dwelling-place as possible for
himself and for those who are to follow him.
The Christian resigns himself to this life
because of his anticipation of another. He
has, he thinks, "a mansion in the sky," and
3 0

In Defence of Sometl
in!J Else

that will compensate him for a third-floor
back in the Mile End Road. The Rationalist
does not resign himself to this life because he
does not see any grounds for anticipating
another. He is discontented with the l\1ile
End Road just beca use he does not believe
himself to be heir to any mansion-in the sky
or anywhere else. And discontent is the begin-
ning of adventure, as it is also the secret of
being "at home." I t is the man who is
possessed of a comfortable home who spends
his evenings at the Club. And, generally
speaking, the more uncomfortable a man's
home is the more time he spends in it.
Thus does he learn that a home is not a
thing that depends on the size of rooms and
the quality of furniture for its existence, but
on that affection the lack of which makes the
mansion tawdry for all its elegance, and the
garret glorious for all its poverty. l\1r.
Chesterton manages to endure home by dream-
ing of New South \tV ales, and by bracing him-
self up to discover a Brighton that doesn't
exist, with the Pavilion as a barbaric temple;
but the happy man who does not mistake an
3 1

A uthordoxy

illusion for an ideal is content to have dis-
covered home. For him it is enough that
centuries of struggle have gone to give him the
ideal of home which he may possess in his
imagination, and the, probably, second-rate
little shanty that he may possess in fact. It is
his life's adventure to reach the ideal, and he
is nerved for that adventure by the real.
While Mr. Chesterton is never at home except
when he is abroad, the Rationalist is never
abroad except when he is at home.
In a typical gibe at modern thought, Mr.
Chesterton says: "I did, like all other solemn
little boys, try to be in advance of my age.
Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in
advance of truth. And I found that I was
eighteen hundred years behind it." I do not
understand what is meant by being ten
minutes in advance of truth. These solemn
little boys who are supposed to entertain that
absurd ambition may have been the sole com-
panions of l\lr. Chesterton's youth-in which
case I can comprehend his queer notions about
lunatics-but most of us have been more
fortunate. We discovered that what we re-
3 2

In Defence of S01nething Else

garded as truth was about eighteen hundred
years behind it, and we are finding no end of
sport in trying to make up for lost time. IV1r.
Chesterton seems to find great glee in the fact
that he does not recognize that any time has
been lost.
There is only one way that I know of meet-
ing the argument that romance is reaction,
which is the argument of the book in hand.
I t is to prove that progress is a romance, and
that it is precisely what is proved by the whole
life of the world as we see it. Ideals begin in
realities. Progress is the name given to the
process of making ideals materialistic realities.
When a young man falls in love, he rises in
character and capacity. What was a vague
dream becomes an obj ect of personal and
enobling desire. The most ordinary and un-
imagina ti ve creatures will do the most heroic
things under the inspiration of the most tender
and terrible of all human emotions. And if
you were to ask one of them what moved him
from being a hand in a pickle factory to be-
come a poet, or a philosopher, or a politician,
or even a preacher, he will not tell you it was
c 33

A uthordoxy

God. He will tell you it was a girl.. And he
will tell you the truth. Men have done great
things for what they believed to be the honour
and glory of God from purely human motives.
But men have never done anything for the
honour and glory of mankind from purely
supernatural motives. For the ideal-which
men call God-has its birth in the reality called
humanity.

34

CHAPTER III-On the Road to Hanwell

I T happened, by one of those coincidences
tha t occur in fiction and in the serious
works of IVir. Chesterton, that as the
prosperous publisher asked what a man is to
believe in, if he cannot believe in himself, Mr.
Chesterton looked up and caught sight of an
omnibus going to-Hanwell! "The men who
really believe in themselves," he said, "are
all in lunatic asylums." And so it comes to
pass that the second chapter of this book in
defence of orthodoxy is entitled "The
l\1aniac."
The argumen t of this cha pter is this:
" Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly
what does breed insanity is reason." Sanity is
the badge of orthodoxy. Insanity is the mark
of the heterodox.
There is a sense in which heterodoxy is like
insanity: it is an abnormal condition of mind.
But it is just the fallacy of such picturesque
analogies as Mr. Chesterton loves to draw that
35

A uthordoxy

they are utterly superficial. Take this case.
Heterodoxy is abnormal, and insanity is ab-
normal. But a giant is abnormal, and so is a
freak. Indeed, in the side-shows a giant is
sometimes classed with the freaks. But Mr.
Chesterton must not tell me that to have an
abnormally developed physique is the same
thing as to have two heads, or a pig's face, or a
body minus arms and legs. One is an abnormal
development along healthy lines; the other is a
deformity, a repellent and hideous monstrosity.
The difference between my friend O'Riordan
-the giant of the Irish Guards-and the Pig-
faced Man is the difference between heterodoxy
and insanity.
In order to make out his case that the men
who really believe in themselves are all in
lunatic asylums, Mr. Chesterton proceeds to
deal with certain cases of delusional insanity
by way of illustration. Other forms of mental
aberration lend themselves less effectively to
the needs of the argument.
When it is stated in plain terms that reason
is the thing that breeds insanity, the average
3 6

On the Road to IIanwell

man rubs his eyes and wonders if he has seen
correctly the words before him. He has heard
of " religious mania," but he has never heard
before of the madness of being too sane.
Moreover, not being quite so easily convinced
as IVIr. Chesterton would like to think he is,
the average man will detect the fallacy of this
assertion with very little effort. To say that
it is reason that breeds insanity is the same as
to say that it is the heart that breeds heart
disease and that "exactly what does cause
blindness is the sight." I t is clear that a man
cannot lose his reason who has no reason, just
as it is clear that a man cannot suffer from
hæmorrhage of the nose who has no nose.
The distinction between reason and imagina-
tion-as if imagination were unreasoning-is,
in this connection, equally wide of the mark.
l\1r. Chesterton says that poets do not go mad
but mathematicians do. The fact is that the
rational conduct of mental processes is the
safeguard of sanity. The poet who goes mad
is the poet who treats poetry as mathematics.
The mathematician who goes mad is the
37

A uthordoxy

mathematician who treats mathematics as
poetry. The religious maniac is a person who
tries to treat religion as a matter of reasoning.
And the only a theist I ever heard of as a
madman was an atheist who attempted to
trea t a theism as a religion.
Let us look at this proposition that "the
men who really believe in themselves are all
in lunatic asylums" again.
On the face of it, it looks to me as if a man
who believes he is a poached egg does not
believe in himself. If he did, he would request
somebody to eat him before he got cold.
Going beneath the surface, it is as plain as
anything can be that the one creed that the
lunatic does not hold is belief in himself.
We may take the cases of delusional insanity
to which Mr. Chesterton refers. There is the
man who thinks he is the rightful King of
England. It would probably be found, if we
could refer to the medical history sheet of this
unfortunate gentleman, that he began as a
member of the Thames Valley Legitimist
Club. He thought the reigning monarch
3 8

On tlte Road to Hanwell

destitute of title; he gave himself to the cult
of the doctrine of hereditary right in monarchy;
he paid no a tten tion to the great movements
of citizenship; and, in course of time, he fell
under the delusion of his own kingship. From
first to last the one person in whom he had no
confidence was himself.
The Legitimists who believe in themselves
as well as in the de jure monarch of England
are not mad. I t is precisely the Legitimist
who does not believe in himself who believes
he is the King of England. Then there is the
case of the man who thinks he is Jesus Christ.
Here we may take a practical example. Some
years ago the Rev. M. Smyth Pigott announced
that he was Jesus Christ. If reliance can be
placed on the testimony of men who knew
him before the days of his delusion, this man
is a typical case of delusional insanity, and
a plain contradiction of Mr. Chesterton's
theory.
He began, this religious maniac, as many
others have begun, with a blameless life, and a
passionate devotion to Jesus Christ. I have
39

A uthordoxy

met men who knew him at Cambridge, who
knew him in the days of his Anglican ministry,
and I quote the words of one of them as
expressive of the opinion of them all: "Smyth
Pigott," said an old, well balanced, and fer-
vently pious rector of a Suffolk parish to me,
"was the. most intensely spiritually minded
man I ever knew." But he had one theme,
the theme of all his preaching, all his devotion,
all his meditation-the early and personal
Second Coming of Jesus Christ. And so, by a
process which can be verified in any work on
delusional insanity, the concentration of his
mind on one theme, to the exclusion of others
that would have given it balance, ended in the
assertion of his own Messiahshi p. I t was not
belief in himself, but belief in Jesus Christ
that drove him mad.
The third case is that of a man who thinks
all men are conspiring against him. Mr.
Chesterton gives a graphic description of the
sinister interpretation this man puts on the
most simple acts. The whole world is full of
snares set specially for him. He is, indeed, in
4 0

On the Road to Hanwell

the frame of mind of the Christian poet,
IVlontgomery, when he wrote:
" 'Vhat is this world? A 'wildering maze,
Where sin hath tracked ten thousand ways,
Her victims to ensnare :
All broad and leading and aslope,
All tempting with perfidious hope,
All ending in despair."

That is the sort of stuff of which insanity is
made. And the man who believes in it is the
last man in this world who can be said to
believe in himself. He believed in the indi-
vidual who is the centre of the conspiracy of
men and demons. But it is not himself that is
the centre of any such conspiracy. The origin
of this very common form of delusional in-
sanity is generally that the victim has com-
mitted, or thinks he has committed, some sin
of awful consequence, and, giving up his mind
to the thought of that offence, he comes in
process of time to believe that he has com-
mitted all the crimes in the calendar. Or, he
has been tricked and cruelly wronged once;
he gives his mind only to the wrong he has
suffered, and comes to believe that the whole
4 1

A uthordoxy

race of men exists to do him injury. Never
for an instant does it occur to him that he is
only Himself.
The madman of experience "is commonly
a reasoner, frequently a successful reasoner,"
says Mr. Chesterton. N ow the one thing a
madman does not do is to reason. Given his
premises-say that the world has nothing else
to do but plot against him-he can argue in
their support. But the world has a great deal
too much to do to bother about the poor man
at all. His premises are insane. What follows
is not reason. It is delusion. If I wanted to
use words as Mr. Chesterton uses them, I
might say that it is imagination. Really it is
no more imagination than it is reason.
Mr. Chesterton might some day write that
book about Brighton as a strange port on an
island in the South Seas, and its Pavilion as a
barbaric temple. If he did, it would be a
work of imagination. But if it ever befell him
to think that Brighton really is a barbaric
place, and the Pavilion a heathen temple, that
would not be imagination; it would be mad-
4 2

On the Road to Hanwell

ness. And Mr. Chesterton will never go mad
because he is not in the least danger of leaving
off reasoning to avoid the madhouse.
The ins ani ty of reasoning is, it seems, that
it leaves nothing for wonder and for awe.
" Mr. McCabe," says Mr. Chesterton, " under-
stands everything, and everything does not
seem worth understanding." This is typically
inaccurate. l\1r. McCabe-or any other sincere
Rationalist-will tell Mr. Chesterton that the
first result of trying to understand the laws
which govern the progress of the world is a
consciousness of the vast tracts that remain
uncharted and unknown. He will tell him
that he finds the world full of wonder, that
there is spread out before him more food for
his imagination than he ever found in theology.
He does not shut his eyes and dream of wonders
that he cannot see. He opens his eyes and
sees wonders of which he never dreamed.
In short, it is not true that Rationalism
cramps the imagination and drives men mad.
It fires the imagination into rational activity
and keeps men sane.

43

A uthordoxy

Mr. Chesterton says: "It is the charge
against the main deductions of the materialist
that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy
his humanity." If by a materialist here is
meant a person without religious belief-the
opposite of a supernaturalist-there could not
be a more preposterous charge. The progress
of more than a century refutes it. Did
materialism involve the loss of his humanity
in Holyoake? Has it distinguished the political
and public career of Lord Morley that he lacks
humanity? Is it not known to every man who
has tried to do work for the benefit of his
fellows that the moment he gets inside any
humanitarian movement he discovers that its
leading spirits are men and women animated
by purely human motives, and working along
secular lines, and that the religious people as a
whole hold aloof ?
Mr. Chesterton concludes this chapter with
the assertion that "the one created thing
which we cannot look at is the one thing in the
light of which we look at everything." But it
is not true that we cannot look at the sun.

44

On the Road to H anwell

What is true is that, if we "vould look at the
sun, we must shield the naked vision with
smoked glasses. Mr. Chesterton hates the
smoked glasses. He would prefer not to look,
or-to take his chance of being blinded. And
that is the distinction between the materialist
and the mystic.

45

CHAPTER IV-The Murder of Thought

T HE process that Mr. Chesterton
describes in the third chapter of his
defence of orthodoxy he calls "The

uicide of Thought." Here is the key-note
to this part of his argument: "A man was
meant to be doubtful about himself, but un-
doubting about the truth; this has been
exactly reversed."
Now, to begin with, I am not aware of any
materialist who says that a man should be
doubtful about the truth. If anyone were to
tell Mr. McCabe that Mr. G. K. Chesterton
is a dwarf, Mr. McCabe would not say that he
was under a different impression, but that, of
course, he might be wrong. To talk about
being "undoubting about the truth" is to
beg the question at issue. That question is-
what is truth?
No materialist doubts the truth. But what
materialists do doubt is that Mr. Chesterton
and his friends have got hold of it all. After
all, truth is not like a marble. You can't take
4 6

The AI urderr of Thought

it up and put it in your pocket. Even the
Catholic Church itself has had to devote great
study to the science of casuistry; and, if Mr.
Chesterton had read moral theology, he would
know that it is often a mighty tricky business
to determine whether a statement is true or
false. So often it is neither, or both. The
only standard of truth is knowledge. Also
knowledge is the only test of falsehood. If I
said that Nelson's column is in W oburn Square,
I should lie, because I know that it is in
Trafalgar Square. But if I hazarded a guess
at its heigh t, knowing nothing a bou tits
dimensions, whatever, no man could call me a
liar if I were wrong, as I probably should be.
If I go into an inn with Mr. Chesterton-
which is one of the things I hope to do before
I die-and I say that bitter beer is better than
whisky, Mr. Chesterton would be the last man
alive to call me a liar because he held whisky
better than bitter beer. Then, if we got to
argument-and we certainly should-and Mr.
Chesterton said that he believed hell to be as
real as Holborn Circus, I should say that I
know Holborn Circus as a place where one
47

A ttthordoxy

stands a good chance of being run over by a
vehicle; but that I do not know hell, which is,
I gather, a place where one has no chance
whatever of getting a drink. I should not say
that Mr. Chesterton was a liar because he said
tha t hell was real. And he would not " call
me another" because I said I knew nothing
about the place. There can be no question of
abstract truth or falsehood when the matter
under discussion is a doubtful matter. And
Mr. Chesterton, if he were offered the wealth
of the world in return, could no more produce
the Rationalist of whom he writes, who
"doubts if he can ever learn," than I can
produce evidence that there is no hell. All I
can say is that there is evidence of the existence
of all the places known to exist. Also I am free
to say that I will believe in the possibility of
the existence of other places if and when I am
given reasonable grounds for that belief. But
I decline to believe in hell simply because
Mr. Chesterton and millions of other people
believe in it.
Mr. Chesterton's quarrel is much more with
the man who doubts than with the man who dis-
4 8

The MU1rder of Thought

believes. I think he would have more sympathy
wi th the iconoclastic freethinker who is alleged
-I believe on very questionable authority
-to have invited the Almighty to strike him
dead within five minutes and awaited the result
watch in hand, than with the sincere man who,
having been born and brought up a Christian,
finds it impossible to believe in the dogmas of
the Church.
The thing that Mr. Chesterton cannot stand
is the open mind. He doesn't appear to care a
fig whether he is the judge on the bench or
the prisoner at the bar, so long as he is not
asked to serve on the jury. "At any street
corner," he says, "we may meet a man who
utters the frantic and blasphemous statement
that he may be wrong." And yet, if this book
of his has any serious controversial purpose,
the author must have written it to appeal to
that very class of men-the men who admit
that they may be wrong.
You have only to turn this hatred of the
open mind the other way round, and look at it
in its positive aspect, and you will see what it
involves. It involves that every man shall say
D 4-9

A uthordoxy

he knows he is right. And there is an end of
the controversial exercise that is dear to Mr.
Chesterton.
The modesty of modern thought upsets
Mr. Chesterton quite as much as its pride.
But he takes care to confine himself pretty
much to what he thinks are the results of this
modesty, and not to bother very much about
its raison d'être. He is like a man whose child
returned one day from school with scarlet
fever which the fond parent attributed to bad
drains. He set to work at once to have the
drains, which were quite in order, attended to,
and, when he had the foundations of his house
out of course, discovered that there was an
epidemic at the school.
How much time and trouble and inconveni-
ence to himself and other people would he have
saved if he had inquired first as to the probable
cause of his child's illness.
It is Mr. Chesterton's habit to go to work
on equally hasty ass urn ptions. And one is
tempted to wonder whether he is afraid that,
if he made more careful inquiry, he would
change his mind.

50

The .Jfurder of Thou,qht

" In so far as religion has gone, reason is
going," says Mr. Chesterton. He proceeds to
support this assertion by taking a rapid
run "through the chief modern fashions of
thought." We will run over the same ground.
The error of materialism, we are told, is
tha tit is mechanical. And," if the mind is
mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting."
Why? There is in a book to which Mr.
Chesterton attaches some authority a passage
which runs something like this: "While the
earth remaineth, seed time and harvest,
summer and winter, snow and heat, shall not
cease." This looks very like the mechanism of
the seasons. And if the seasons are mechanical,
summer cannot be very beautiful! That
seems to be the end of Mr. Chesterton's argu-
ment. But who save the apologist with some
special ends of his own to look after will con-
fuse such mechanism with monotony?
Next we have the" attack on thought urged
by Mr. H. G. Wells when he insists that every
separate thing is 'unique,' and there are no
categories at all."
I do not pretend to know exactly where this
51

A uthordoxy

doctrine of Mr. Wells is expounded. But the
contribution it brings to modern thought is
that it enables us to realize that categories are
working instruments and not things of value
in themselves. It enables us to recognize, for
example, that, although Mr. Chesterton is in
the category called Christians, and holds the
faith common to them all, they by no means
all hold the faith peculiar to himself. The
most characteristic thing about any category
is the way it fails to include all it was intended
to include. For want of more room a lot gets
stuffed into it that it is not strictly speaking
entitled to hold, and this lot juts out. Mr.
\Vells points out to us the people and the things
that jut out, and it is really very difficult to see
how this is an attack on thought. A man is a
man all the world over. Yet there are no two
men alike.
Mr. Chesterton's next anathema is against
" the false theory of progress which maintains
that we alter the test, instead of trying to pass
the test." As to this, it is best to take an
actual example. Belief in God used to be the
test of a man's veracity in the courts. Now,
52

The .M1trder of Thought

as he pleases, he can affirm, instead of swearing
" by Almighty God." We have altered the
test just because we have passed it.
There is a good deal more in this chapter
which I, being an unlearned person, shall not
follow with a detailed reply. Bernard Shaw
and Nietzsche and Renan and Tolstoy, and al]
the things they have done to the men of our
time-all this is set out in the pages that wind
up this part of the book. And the moral of it
all is, according to our author, that" in so far
as religion has gone, reason is going." And
the proof? Tha t there is more reasoning in
the world to-day than ever before. I t is like
Mr. Chesterton to set out to convince us that
reason is going-and to do it by proving that
reason has come.
F or there is in all these efforts of the human
mind to comprehend the riddle of the universe
some element of truth. That element is the
answer to all this pother about reason driving
men mad. Better the madness of Tolstoy than
the sanity of Torquemada. Better the sane
insanity of a Robert Owen than the insane
sanity of the gospel which, acting on the
53

A uthordoxy

principles Mr. Chesterton admires, sought to
block his path as it has attempted to block the
path of every man who has thought more of
the salvation of the poor crushed bodies of
humanity than of the" salvation" of his own
soul.
It is too late in the day to frighten us with
the bugbear of Reason. We are entering upon
the age of Reason, and, although we have not
yet lived very long under the new dispensation,
we invite a comparison of the Europe of to-day
with the Europe of the ages of faith, and we
have no fear of the result.

54

CHAPTER V-On Castles in the Air

T HERE is a whimsical charm about the
next chapter of Orthodoxy, which is
en ti tIed "The Ethics of Elfland."
The argument of the chapter, if, indeed, there
is any argument in it, seems to be this: Mr.
Chesterton is not Mr. Chesterton. Mr.
Chesterton is Peter Pan. He is the boy that
has never grown up, and his main hope is that
he never will.
I always thought of Peter Pan with unmixed
delight until I read Mr. Chesterton's all too
gra phic description of the sort of man a man
who has never left off being a boy really is.
Now it occurs to me that the main joy of being
a boy is that one does not remain a boy for ever.
It is a sad thing to assert, but I fear it is the
truth that Mr. Chesterton is in violent anta-
gonism to St. Paul. "When I became a man,
I put away childish things," said St. Paul.
"All the worse for you, poor man," Mr.
Chesterton replies.
l\lr. Chesterton says: "I have not lost my
55

A uthordoæy

ideals in the least." The wild hopes of childish
imagination still fill his soul. Ah! but what
a bou t the sense of their reality. The ideals of
the child are not ideals. They are realities.
And, alas, the realities of manhood are often
very remote from ideals.
I remember reading a not very brilliant poem
written, I should think, by a young man in the
early days of his disillusionment. It describes
a visit to the country, and a meeting with a
village girl he had loved as a boy :

" She still is there-again I saw
Her standing at the cottage door,
And could but hang my head and think
That I am worthy her no more."

He proceeds to contrast the simple purity of
the life she has lived in the village

"secure . . .
From the dread IDa ul of urban vice; "

with the manhood that has lost its buoyancy
with its boyhood, and he concludes:

"This world has made me what I am,
Its taint upon me must abide:
I wish I were a child again
Whene'er I see the countryside."
56

On Oastles in the Air

This is not, as I have said, at all brilliantly
expressed, but it describes a very common
mental experience. For good or evil-for evil
Mr. Chesterton rather surprisingly seems to
think-we grow up. It is a fine thing if we
can carryover the ideals of childhood, the
dreams of youth, in to the more placid years
of ma turi ty. But those ideals and dreams are
not maturity, which is what Mr. Chesterton
seems to take them for.
There comes a time when we find out Santa
Claus. He was a delightful old gentleman who
came down the chimney on Christmas Eve to
fill our stockings with presents. """e loved him
because he gave us things. We did not love
him a part from his gifts, for a part from his
gifts we knew nothing about him. And then,
one Christmas Eve, we found out that the name
of Santa Claus is Father and Mother. Mr.
Chesterton thinks this discovery a calamity.
To find out things is to lose them if he is right.
It seems to me that we never really find Santa
Claus until we find him out. Then we know
that gifts do not come inscrutably out of
heaven in a bag on the back of an old man of
57

A uthordoxy

vague identity, but that they come from shops,
and have to be paid for with money that has
to be worked for, and that might have been
spent on the people who worked for it. We
learn that benevolence is not a shadowy god-
father who comes down the chimney, but a
substantial father who comes up the stairs.
We never felt any real gratitude to Santa
Claus, because it seemed there was nothing to
prevent him getting as many toys and sweet-
meats as he wanted for all the boys and girls
in the world. But we are grateful to Father,
because we heard him telling that" things will
be pretty bad this Christmas, but, whatever
else goes, the kiddies must have a good
time. "
We thought that the gifts of Christmas
were miraculous. We discover them to be
paternal. We thought our benefactor, having
left his gifts, departed into space, or into
heaven, until next Christmas. We find he
went no farther than the kitchen, where he sat
smoking his pipe, and, with Mother's hand in
his, discussing how much would have to be
knocked of the little sums they spent upon
58

On Oastles in the Air

themselves because the kiddies had to be given
a good time.
I am sure if ever I had met Santa Claus on
Christmas morning I should have asked for
something more or something different from
his inexhaustible stock. But I know that, when
I met my father on the morning after I dis-
oovered his name was Santa Claus, there was
more in the kiss I gave him than in any I had
given him before.
Mr. Chesterton says: "When the business
man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is
commonly in some such speech as this: 'Ah,
yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in
the abstract and these castles in the air; but
in middle age they all break up like clouds, and
one comes down to a belief in practical politics,
to using the machinery one has and getting on
with the world as it is."
I t may be there are business men who talk
thus to their office-boys. I never met one of
them. It is certainly true that some such
statements as these are often made when
experience meets impatience. But they do
not of necessity bear the somewhat sinister
59

A uthordoxy

significance that Mr. Chesterton bestows upon
them.
To come down to "using the machinery
one has and getting on with the world as it is "
is not the same thing as coming to regard that
machinery as incapable of improvement and
the world as incapable of being other than it is.
There is no use in a boy cherishing the abstract
ideal of writing plays like Shakespeare, or
clever books like Mr. Chesterton, if he will not
settle down to learn English. The only people
who improve the state of practical politics are
people who believe in practical politics.
Mr. Chesterton's own phrase, unwittingly
no doubt, is fatal to his own argument. He
says, "in middle age they "-ideals-" all break
up like clouds." Yes. And, when the clouds
break, there is rain. And the rain makes the
flowers grow, and cleanses the atmosphere, and
washes out the gutters.
Mr. Chesterton writes of " a certain way of
looking at life, which was created in me by the
fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified
by the mere facts." In so far as he gives us
any actual exam pIes of these processes of
60

On Oastles in the A i'J

creation and ratification, he makes it plain that
the benefit he derived from fairy tales was
that they taught him certain things which are
not fairy tales but facts. He got from Jack
the Giant Killer the notion of " manly mutiny
against pride as such." He got from Cinderella
the lesson "of the Magnificat-exaltavit
humiles." He did not get from fairy tales a
belief in fairy tales. He got from fairy tales
a belief in facts. He does not believe that
coaches can be made out of pumpkins, but
he does believe that the miserable can be made
happy.
The ethics of Elfland turn out, after all, to
be the ethics of earth. Wi th a good deal that
Mr. Chesterton writes about magic and spells
and enchantments it is quite impossible to
argue. When a man says that " a tree grows
fruit because it is a magic tree," he puts him-
self beyond the reach of any argument that
one could use. Presumably a man has children
because he is a magic man, or writes books
because he is a magic man, or does any creative
act because he is a magic man. This is sup-
posed to prove that there is no such thing as
61

A uthordoxy

unalterable law. If it were true, it would only
prove that there is an unalterable law named
.
magIc.
" It is no argument for unalterable law (as
Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary
course of things. We do not count on it. We
bet on it." In this statement, as in so
many other of his statements, Mr. Chesterton
attempts to be impressive by being imperti-
nent. For we do count on the ordinary course
of things.
Again and again in this book of his Mr.
Chesterton confuses the issue by mere wealth
of analogy and recklessness of assertion. " You
cannot imagine two and one not making three.
But you can easily imagine trees not growing
fruit; you can imagine them growing golden
candlesticks. "
That fruit trees sometimes do not grow fruit
is not a matter of imagination at all. I t is a
matter of fact. And, if you have a fruit tree
that does not bear, your gardener will in-
variably be able to tell you why. Mr. Chester-
ton might in a speculative mood have a bet
with me that a cherry tree of mine will not
62

On Castles in the Air

grow cherries. But he would not have a bet
with me that it will grow candlesticks.
There is a similar confusion and a similar
irresponsibility of phrase all through this book,
but especially all through this chapter of it.
Having told us that he learned from Jack the
Giant Killer that" the rebel is older than all
the kingdoms," Mr. Chesterton tells us a few
pages later that" I never could join the young
men of my time in feeling what they called
the general sentiment of revolt."
This inability arose from the fact that he
" did not feel disposed to resist any rule merely
because it was mysterious."
I do not know who these young men of 1\1r.
Chesterton's time were, but I should like to
hear of the man among them who proposed to
resist a rule" merely because it was mysterious."
I would undertake to bet 1\1r. Chesterton any
odds that what these young men of his time
objected to was being called upon to accept
any rule" merely because it was mysterious."
They claimed the right to examine the rules
to see that they made for what is called" play-
ing the game." And if they came upon a rule
63

A uthordoxy

which looked as if it was put in to give some
one an unfair advantage, they did not see that
it was an incontestible argument for its reten-
tion, that it always appeared to have been there,
and that nobody knew who put it there.
Nobody questions the rule that a man must
eat. But many people question the rule that
he must eat flesh. I do not sympathize with
these people, mainly because they mostly look
so ostentatiously in need of sympathy. But I
recognize that it is one thing to say a man
must eat to live, and quite another to say he
must eat flesh to live well.
The " general sentiment of revolt" which
characterizes our time might more accurately
be called the general demand for inquiry.
And, if it be true that a man "cannot by
searching find out God," it is also true that
he can by searching find out that he cannot
find him.
The one thing that Mr. Chesterton never
faces in this book is the situation that arises
when one comes to deal with those parts of the
fairy tales that are fairy tales. He shirks the
question of what is to be done when the part
64

On Castles in the Air

of a fairy tale that is a fairy tale comes into
violen t collision with the part of a fairy tale
that is a fact. It does not meet the needs of the
case to deny the collision, for the collision was
the real cause of Mr. Chesterton's book.
He tells us why he believes in fairy tales.
He also tells us when he believes in facts. It is
when they do not contradict fairy tales.

E

65

CHAPTER VI-The Flag of the Othetp
World

M R. CHESTERTON proceeds, in a
cha pter en ti tIed "The Flag of the
World," to set out the view that
our attitude to life can best be expressed" in
terms of a kind of military loyalty." And this
after he has told us in the previous chapter not
to believe in "unalterable law." For once
there is no parodox in the terms in which the
author's attitude is expressed. For it is pre-
cisely " a kind of military loyalty" that is the
attitude of the Christian towards life. He is
a person under orders, and the unalterable law
of his existence is that he must obey. He must
not question, or, if he does, he must keep his
questioning to himself, and go on doing the
thing the righteousness of which he questions
until such time as he has made up his mind
to face the penalties of revolt. And, when
he does that, he will still be regarded as
a soldier by the au thori ties, and they will
keep on treating him as an insubordinate and
66

The Flag of the Other 1Vorld

rebellious soldier as long as he lives, and-
so they tell him-for ever and ever after-
wards.
But Mr. Chesterton has a genius for picking
out the attractive part of unattractive things,
and making them look as though they are not
parts but the whole. Thus he tells us that the
world" is the fortress of our family, with the
flag flying on the turret," a very pretty, and,
rightly understood, a very true notion. The
trouble is that the Christian with his" military
loyalty" persists in the assertion that the
fortress, albeit the present home of the whole
family of us, really belongs to his branch of the
family; and that the flag, if things were as
they should be, should not be the flag of the
kingdom of man, but the flag of the regiment
to which he belongs, and so should have a
cross u pon it.
The result of this is something like civil
war. The fortress, at the very moment when
it seems secure from external attack, is en-
dangered by internal division. The flag, on
the very day when it should be floating boldly
67

A Uth01 1O doxy

in the breeze, is hauled down while an inquiry
is held as to what right it had ever to have
been run up.
"Military loyalty" is the worst kind of
loyalty there is, although, alas, we have not
yet learned to recognize it as such. As these
lines are being written, Europe is being
deluged with the blood of the men she can
least afford to lose, the young strong men, in
order to save her from the domination of
. mere" military loyalty" in the future. The
only military loyalty that is worth a fig is not
military loyalty. The loyalty of the soldiers
of the Allies in this war is not, strictly speak-
ing, military loyalty, although it can find no
more effective expression than in military
forms. The loyalty of the Prussian is military
loyalty; and it is treachery to the welfare of
the human family. A man who is compelled
to fight may, no doubt, be as good a soldier as
as a volunteer. But the essence of the only
militarism that is not vile and demoralizing is
voluntarism. And the essence of the militarism
that is vile and demoralizing is compulsion.
The" military loyalty" of which Mr. Chester-
68

The Flag of the Other W 01-ld

ton writes will be found to belong to the latter
class. Compulsion is its essence.
Writing of the origins of morality, Mr.
Chesterton says that men" did not cultivate
cleanliness. They purified themselves for the
altar, and found that they were clean."
Leaving aside the question as to why they
never felt any need of purifying themselves
for their own comfort, this is the result. Men
became clean because they were commanded
to become clean. Or, as Mr. Chesterton him-
self puts it, "the Ten Commandments . . .
were merely military commands; a code of
regimental orders."
Now military commands may be necessary
when a fortress is being used as a fortress, but
they are not necessary when it is being used as
a residence. Regimen tal orders are all very
well when the enemy is abroad, but we want
none of them when the family is at home. The
Christian attitude towards life as represented
by Mr. Chesterton-and in this respect he
certainly does not misrepresent it-is an
attempt to run a fighting army as a family
party, and a family party as a military engage-
69

A uthordoxy

mente In both aspects of it the attempt is
doomed to failure. I t was not always so. In
the days of the Christian domination of Europe
it was otherwise. But I doubt if even Mr.
Chesterton really wishes to see a return to
the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages were the Christian Ages,
and from them we can see how Christian
principles work out. We will begin with that
question of cleanliness to which reference has
been made already. Mr. Chesterton told us,
it will be remembered, that men purified them-
selves for the altar, and so they became clean.
That is to say they became clean in obedience
to a command. But in the Middle Ages there
were men who deliberately became dirty for
the sake of the altar, and that is the sort of
reaction that comes from mere obedience to
external sanctions.
The Jew, to whom the command was first
given, became clean in order that he might
worship; and the Christian was so occupied
with the necessity of worship that he forgot
to be clean. He went further and turned this
forgetfulness into a virtue, thinking to show
7 0

The Flag of the Othe1. World

by a filthy habit of body an immaculate cleanli-
ness of soul.
I remember sitting at lunch with a French
community settled in England, and during
the meal the usual ascetical reading went on.
On this occasion, the work read was the life of
the pious founder of the community, and I
shall never forget the faces of two English
members of the community during the read-
ing of a passage describing this holy man's
mortifications in the way of voluntary dirti-
ness. Impatience, disgust, pity, and above all,
I thought, anger that this passage should have
been read at meal-time, and in the presence of
a critical visitor.
I t is a proverb of man's invention that
" cleanliness is next to godliness." Cleanliness
had a great struggle for that position. It was
found, even in comparatively recent times,
that sanctity had no great love of soap. The
movements that have made personal and public
cleanliness so general that to-day it seems in-
credible that they should have been rare have
been movements that have originated not in
an external comn1and, but in human necessity
7 1

A 1tthordoxy

and in human affection. They have been
voluntary movements. The places in the
(Christian) world to-day that are the most
dirty are the places that are the most Chris-
tian.
I t is such a fact as this that answers out of
hand all Mr. Chesterton has to say about the
way in '\tvhich Christianity combines necessary
rest and necessary restlessness. He says: " We
have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's
castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own
cottage, to which we can return at evening."
For twenty centuries Christians have been
regarding the universe as an ogre's castle that
had to be stormed. But it is only since Chris-
tianity has been driven in advanced countries
to think a little less of the ogre that it has dis-
played some hesitating and yet willing inclina-
tion to regard the universe as " our own cottage
to which we may return at evening." Ration-
alism has almost succeeded in freeing the
cottage from the ogre; presently it will
succeed in banishing him from the universe in
which, of course, he has not, and never has
had, any real existence.
7 2

The Flag of the Othe1. World

I t all comes back to that argumen t \vi th
which this chapter began about loyalty.
" lVlilitary loyalty," which is IV!r. Chesterton's
attitude towards life, is essentially blind
loyalty. The Christian is the real determinist
if determinism is the gloomy thing he pictures
it. There is no greater or, perhaps I should
say, meaner Fatalism than belief in the Chris-
tian revelation. Because men have believed
in it for many centuries they are fighting each
other to-day in the bloody fields of France and
Flanders. The Belgian peasant is blown to
atoms while he kneels at a wayside shrine; the
French peasant is torn open by a shell while
he recites the rosary; the Russian peasant
stops to kiss an icon and his bending head is
blown off his body; the English peasant reads
his khaki-bound New Testament by the way-
side, and meditates on the statement that
" two sparrows are sold for a farthing. And
one of them shall not fall to the ground without
your Father. But the very hairs of your head
are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore; ye
are of more value than many sparrows."
\Vhilc he is yet meditating, a shot brings him
73

A uthordox'lJ

to the ground, and his closing eyes behold
many sparrows chirping on the road. These
are the things that follow in the wake of the
"military loyalty" view of life. There is
nothing more orthodox than war. And there
is nothing that is at root so abominable.
The Visible Head of Christendom has sent
his blessing to all his children who are soldiers,
but he has been powerless to stop them from
fighting one another. Why? Because in so
far as they are all children of the Christian
faith they have all this poison of "military
loyalty," obedience, submission, in their blood.
It is the loyalty that comes of revolt that will
save the world, the loyalty of man to man, of
the citizen to the community, of the brother
to the brotherhood. I t is the warfare against
superstition and ignorance, the warfare of the
school, the hospital, the laboratory, the Trade
Union, that will set the wide world free.
Everyone of the characteristics of Chris-
tianity that fills Mr. Chesterton with satis-
faction is not a peculiar characteristic of
Christianity at all. And, if it could be given
him to come back to this world when men have
74

The Flag of the Other JVorld

en tered into a larger share of the possessions of
humanity than they at present possess, he
would find them still with fairy tales, more
fairy tales than ever before because they would
have a greater appreciation of them than
Christians ever had; he would find the world
the fortress of our fan1ily, with the flag flying
on the turret, and when he entered the fortress
he would discover that the happy rivalries of
peace had succeeded the cruel rivalries of war
and had been found not less exciting.
I t may be said that this is mere prophecy. I
say that it is the only future thing of which we
can be reasonably certain. The victory that
the Flag of the Other World could never
inspire will be won by the bloodless warfare of
the gallant soldiers of humanity who fight for
the Flag of the World.

75

CHAPTER VII-The Ohristianity of
Paradoxes

I T is a rather easy thing to write in para-
doxes. If you will try to do it, you will
be surprised not only at the easiness of
the business, but at the fact that you can make
sense of almost everything you have written.
Most popular sayings or proverbs, for example,
look quite well turned upside down; and very
often when they have been turned upside down
they seem to be the right way up. To say that
sin covers a multitude of charity is certainly
not less true than to say that charity covers a
multitude of sins. Also it is no difficult matter
to invent analogies and comparisons that are
arresting by reason of their grotesqueness.
Thus, I may say of a weak, decadent artist
that he set out for the realms of gold but
somehow he could never get beyond the
Golden Lion. Or I may, by the simpler
process of ordinary alliteration, say of this
man that he sought immortality and found
intoxication.

7 6

The Christianity of Paradoxes

Again, I may say of a writer who points out
obvious things in an original way something
like this: I t is interesting to hear of the beauty
of Switzerland and of the immorality of Paris.
But it gives us a shock to hear of the beauty
of Battersea Park and the immorality of Baker
Street.
N ow, the only thing against this sort of
writing is that it is so easy. Once a man begins
it, he finds himself doing it almost unconsciously
before long. If you confine yourself to con-
ventional modes of expression, it may some-
times take you an hour to write a sentence.
F or if you use words ordinarily you must be
at the pains of writing what is intelligible.
But if you use words fantastically you make
the appalling discovery that you can write
much more attractively, and with very little
trouble. Eccentricity in writing, like eccen-
trici ty in dress, is very often a mere cloak to
hide a want of brains rather than the signal of
their existence. I t is, generally speaking, the
poet who is not a poet who wears long hair.
These remarks are not by way of diagnosis
of l\1r. Chesterton's method of writing. Nor
77

A uthordoxy

are they in any exact sense a description of it.
To say that he uses fantastic forms of words
beca use he is not over-blessed with brains
would be to make a statement not only untrue,
but preposterously untrue. He could use any
form of words he chose and be free from the
suspicion of mere journalistic trickery.
I t seems to me, nevertheless, that Mr.
Chesterton's amazingly clever use of a fantastic
style of writing has made him impervious to
some weighty matters that he ought to have
considered. His excess of logic prevents him
from being logical. He misses the point in the
very dexterity of his definition of it. The
nimbleness of his mind and of his wit are
responsible for his somewhat trying habit of
darting in to a new theme before he has half
exhausted the old one. It is often literally
true of him that he cannot see the wood for
the trees.
In the chapter of his book which I have now
to consider, Mr. Chesterton begins by saying
that the real trouble with the world" is that
it is nearly reasonable, but not quite." The
real trouble with Mr. Chesterton is exactly the
7 8

The Ch1tistianity of Paradoxes

same. And the real danger of Mr. Chesterton's
apologetic is that it is often so near the truth
as to be mistaken for it, even by himself.
There is a saying that a half-truth is worse
than a lie; but ninety-nine hundredths of
truth plus one hundredth of error is the worst
error of all because it is so near the truth. All
teetotal drinks are a bomina ble things, but none
is so abominable as the teetotal drink that is
bottled and la belled and coloured like, and
called, ale. I t holds not only the physical
danger of being a dispiriting and gassy con-
coction, but the mental danger of being mis-
taken for a rational drink. It is an awful thing
to have the pleasant anticipation of a glad
heart and then to experience a stomach-ache.
When Mr. Chesterton writes, as he does in
the chapter of Orthodoxy now before us, of
" The Paradoxes of Christianity," we get full
measure of his qualities as a writer, but we also
get full measure of the defects of those qualities.
And that is why I have tried, possibly with in-
differen t success, to set out at the beginning
of this chapter what those qualities and defects
are.

79

A utl
o1'doxy

I t is a suspicious practice to begin an argu-
ment with a supposition. A supposition at the
end of an argument is often a reasonable sup-
position justified by the argument that has
preceded it. But a supposition at the begin-
ning of an argument is mostly an attempt to
give an unreasonable argument the air of
rationality.
Mr. Chesterton begins this chapter with a
supposition. It is as follows: "Suppose some
mathematical creature from the moon were
to reckon up the human body; ,he would at
once see that the essential thing about it was
tha t it was d u plica tee A man is two men, he
on the right exactly resembling him on the
left. Having noted that there was an arm on
the right and one on the left, a leg on the right
and one on the left " (and so on through all
the duplicate parts), "he would take it as a
law; and then, where he found a heart on
one side, would deduce that there was another
heart on the other. And just then, where
he most felt he was right, he would be
wrong."
The mistake of the" mathematical creature
80

The Christianity of Paradoxes

from the moon " is supposed to be the mistake
of the Rationalist. But it is the weakness of
Mr. Chesterton's argument that he had to
" suppose" the creature from the moon in
order to make his accusation against Rationalism
appear rational. He could not have begun the
argument right away by saying: "Suppose a
Rationalist from Manchester were to reckon
up the human body," etc., because there is no
Rationalist in Manchester or anywhere else
who would make the mistake upon which his
argument depends. But then, as our author
artlessly confesses, " it is very hard for a man
to defend anything of which he is entirely
convinced." The difficulty is not decreased, I
should rather say it is increased, when you have
become en tirely convinced of a thing by a
series of most unconvincing processes. I con-
fess I am amazed at the things that made Mr.
Chesterton a Christian. He sets some of them
down in this chapter, and I will now hastily
examine one or two of them.
" It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and
Bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox
theology," says Mr. Chesterton. Let us see
F 81

A uthordoxy

how they did it. First of all, they contra-
dicted themselves.
The superficial reader of Mr. Chesterton will
probably remark, "Surely it is his case that
everything is a contradiction." To which I
reply that his case is nothing like so reasonable
as that. His case is that contradictions in
Christianity are all parts of the great whole,
paradoxes of infinite significance. But contra-
dictions in Rationalism must be tested at their
face value. It must never be admitted that
they may not be contradictions at all.
This is the first contradiction that Mr.
Chesterton discovered in the case for Ration-
alism. "One accusation against Christianity
was that it prevented men, by morbid tears
and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in
the bosom of Nature. But another accusation
was that it comforted men with a fictitious
providence, and put them in a pink and white
nursery. . . . One rationalist had hardly done
calling Christianity a nightmare before another
began to call it a fool's paradise."
There is a saying that provides a simple
reconcilia tion of these alleged contradictions.
82

The Christianity of Paradoxes

It is the saying that there are people who are
never happy except when they are miserable.
One of these criticisms was of Christianity
in its social aspect, and the other was a
criticism directed to the personal aspect.
Christiani ty robs a man of the joys of this life
by such teaching as this: "Love not the
world, nei ther the things that are in the
world. If any man love the world, the love of
the Father is not in him." Then, by way of
compensation for this horrible ultimatum,
Christianity says that if a man does not love
this world and the things in it he shall be
wa tched over very carefully in all the dangers
of its ungodly happiness, and he shall have
everlasting felicity after he is dead. There is
no contradiction in asserting that both these
doctrines are evil. The first beca use it makes
life a penal ty, instead of a pleasure; the
second because it makes man a selfish and out-
landish sort of optimist, whose personal
optimism about the world to come is con-
di tional on his being a pessimistic pest in the
world that now is. If l\1r. Chesterton can get
any Catholic priest to introduce him to a
83

A uthordoxy

Ca tholic of great scru pulosi ty, or if he will
spend a Sunday morning at the nearest meeting-
place of the Plymouth Brethren, he will see the
people of whom it is literally true that they
are never happy but when they are miserable,
and he ought to see that this contradiction of
the Rationalist's is no contradiction at all.
Another of these Rationalistic contra-
dictions in the criticism of Christianity was
this. "The very people who reproached
Christianity with the meekness and non-
resistance of the monasteries were the very
people who reproached it also with the violence
and valour of the Crusades. . . . I had got
thoroughly angry with the Christian, because
he was never angry. And now I was told to
be angry with him because his anger had been
the most huge and horrible thing in human
history." I have tried very hard to see
that these criticisms are mutually destructive,
but I can find nothing but rational criticism
in them.
I do not wish to in trod uce irrelevant matter,
but it is almost a necessity here to call atten-
tion to the fact that, whatever the Christianity
84-

The Christian
:ty of Paradoxes

of IV!r. Chesterton and the Church may be,
it is not the teaching of Christ. If Christ
taught one thing clearly that thing was non-
resistance. And non-resistance as he taught
it is nonsense. The Church has never at-
tempted to carry this teaching out, but it has
pretended to be carrying it out in the very
repudiation of it. I do not blame any Chris-
tian for not attempting to obey literally the
Sermon on the Mount, but I do blame every
Christian who tries to keep up the hypocrisy
that to disobey it is to obey it in spirit. In the
Cambridge Bible series, the volume on St.
Luke-by the late Dean Farrar-contains a
flagrant example of this hypocrisy. In com-
menting on Christ's statement: "Give to
every man that asketh of thee," the writer
says: "The spirit of our Lord's precept is
now best fulfilled by not giving to every man
that asks."
This has been a digression, and I must return
from the teaching of Christ to the teaching
of Christianity, and to these alleged contra-
dictions in the criticism of it. Christianity
may be rightly blamed both for its tenet of
85

A uthordoxy

irrational meekness for the individual, and for
its tenet of irrational massacre for the com-
munity. For the one is the complement of
the other.
The Christian must be meek, so that the
Church may inherit the earth. It was the
meekness of the monasteries that made possible
the violence of the Crusades. It is the history
of Christian meekness that it has never been
displayed when meekness was needed. And it
is the history of Christian violence that it has
never been in evidence when violence was
really required. Christianity showed no meek-
ness in the sixteenth century in an orgy of
violence, and no violence in the eighteenth
century in a debauch of meekness. It always
commanded men to be meek when they had
something to fight for, and to be warlike when
they had nothing to fight against. I t fought
against the Turk for the Holy Sepulchre, which
is supposed to have contained the body of
Christ, but it would not fight against the
capitalist for the body of the child-labourer,
although it professed to believe that body the
Temple of the Holy Ghost.
86

The Christianity of Pa'l'adoxes

And so with all the rest of the contradictions
which Mr. Chesterton discovered in the
Rationalistic propaganda. They are contra-
dictions only in the sense that lVIr. Chesterton's
ca talogue of the clashing virtues of Christianity
is a series of contradictions. He tells us it is
the glory of Christianity that it is paradoxical,
and then the critic, when he sees the paradox
bu t fails to see the glory, is soundly thrashed
on the assumption that there is not a paradox
in the whole creed of Christendom.

87

CHAPTER VIII-The Eternal Repetition

B y the Eternal Revolution, which is the
subject of hìs next chapter, Mr.
Chesterton seems to mean that the
world is being made better by the Christian
influences at work upon it, and that the main
virtue of the im provemen ts is that they are
reactions. The principle, if such it can be
called, reminds me of the Catholic doctrine
of Development. There is the Deposit of
Faith which has been given "once for all,"
the process of revelation which is over and
done with. But the Church's explicit know-
ledge of the contents of this Deposit, and of
the full significance thereof, is not instan-
taneous but progressive. Thus it comes to
pass that the infallibility of the Pope is, for
those who hold this doctrine, as much a part
of the Christian faith as the sinlessness of
Christ. Just because the Catholic Christian
begins by solving every riddle there are
always more riddles for him to solve; and
precisely because he begins with an act of re-
88

The Eternal Repetition

signation he is for ever committing acts of
war; the impregnable fortress is eternally
on the defensive just because it is impreg-
nable.
Mr. Chesterton carries this paradox over
into the field of social action and tells us:
" You cannot even say that there is victory or
superiority in nature unless you have some
doctrine about what things are superior."
You cannot argue about the contents of the
Deposit of Faith until you have decided that
there is a Deposit. You cannot argue about
the significance of what Christ said to Peter
if you regard it as highly problematical whether
Christ said anything at all to Peter or to any-
one else. You cannot debate the question of
the godhead of Jesus until you are satisfied
about his manhood. These are very obvious
statements, but such obvious statements are
just the statements in most danger of being
carelessly and irrelevantly made.
We see with an almost indecent alacrity what
principles involve for our opponents, but we
are frequently uncommonly slow to recognize
that the same principles involve the same
89

A uthordoxy

things for all of us. I remember picking up
some years ago a volume of a magazine of
Mr. Kensit's. It contained an example of this
sort of inconsistency so remarkable that I
made a note of it. I found on one page a
hea ted den uncia tion of pictures as aids to
devotion. For some inscrutable reason it
appeared that to have a picture of Christ in a
place dedicated to his worship was to dis-
honour him. Mr. Kensit, who, I make no
doubt, would knock down a man who spat at
the photograph of his mother, would rather
admire a man who tore down and burned a
picture of the mother of Christ. I was still
thinking about this strange state of mind,
turning over the pages of this magazine care-
lessly the while, when my eye caught an article
abou t a picture. I t was a picture of which
Mr. Kensi t had some copies to sell, depicting,
I think, a hunted Protestant reading a hidden
Bible. And this is what the article said about
the sort of pictures we should have in our
houses. In buying a picture we should con-
sider " whether its teaching portrays a link in
the chain of truth; whether it records or
9 0

TIle Eternal Repetition

interprets anything unfamiliar; whether it
adds one single stone to our heaven-pointed
pyramid, cuts a\vay one dark bough, or levels
one hillock in our path." This is an advertise-
ment by a man with something to sell, it is not
art criticism, and it is not theology; but it is
an advertisement by a man in whose sincerity
in his bigotry it will do us no harm to believe,
and who does not see that in this praise of the
moral use of pictures he has handed himself
over gagged and bound to the Jesuit who was
only waiting round the corner for something of
this sort to happen !
The coupling of their names will I fear
seriously annoy both of them, but I am bound
to say I think there are many resemblances
between Mr. Kensit and Mr. Chesterton. And
the principal point of resemblance is that they
see what certain standards imply for other
people, but they do not see what their own
standards imply for themselves. Mr. Kensit,
for example, does not see that he cannot sell
pictures of the founder of the Kensi t Crusade
at one shop in the City, and at the same
time object to another Christian shopkeeper
9 1

A uthordoxy

selling pictures of the founder of the Christian
religion. Mr. Chesterton does not see that he
cannot say that "except for some human or
divine theory there is no principle in nature"
in order to dish the Rationalist, and at the same
time denounce the Rationalist for saying the
same thing with this addendum that personally
he (the Rationalist) is for the human theory
against the divine. As I said at the outset
of these criticisms, Mr. Chesterton's position
is that a man can eat his cake and have it
too.
Mr. Chesterton would have the mere
Rationalist to be very precise in his language
while, at the same time, he denounces him for
not making use of the language of the people,
which notoriously lacks precision. But no man
is more precise, nay pedantic, in his use of
words than Mr. Chesterton; and no man so
frequently manages to miss their common
meaning. Thus he tells us that he prefers the
word reform to the words progress and evolu-
tion. But of these three words the word
reform is the word which most frequently is
used without the significance that Mr. Chester-
9 2

The Eter1
al Repegition

ton considers its ad van tage over the others:
i.e. that reform implies form.
To take the first two instances that come to
my mind. Tariff Reform meant the reform
of something which didn't exist. Poor Law
Reform means, in the mouths of those who
most often write and talk about it, the aboli-
tion of the Poor Law.
The fact is that Mr. Chesterton is precise
when he should be careless and careless when
he should be precise.
A quite true story, which is as amusing as it
is significant, is told of a well-known Irish
l\1ember of Parliament. He was about to start
out on a flome Rule campaign, and he called
at the office of the United Irish League for his
itinerary. As he was leaving the secretary
said to him: "Here! stick this bundle of
leaflets in your pocket-all the facts brought
up to date." To which the Irish Member of
Parliament impatiently replied: "Och! what
do I want wid facts: gineralities are good
enough for me."
I t was quite true. Generalities were good
enough for him because he had had twenty-
93

A uthordoxy

five years' daily contact with the facts. He
knew that he could arouse more sympathy and
enthusiasm for Ireland by stories of bad laws
in operation than by the precise analysis of the
bad laws, or the careful exposition of better
ones.
I t is the man who knows who can deal in
generalities; it is the man who is concerned to
prove that somebody else doesn't know who
must deal only in facts.
Dealing with the idea of progress, or
advance, or reform, Mr. Chesterton says:
"The only intelligible sense that progress or
advance can have among men, is that we have
a definite vision, and that we wish to make the
whole world like that vision." This is the
generalization of the man who does not realize
the facts; hence it is an utterly unconvincing
generalization.
The Christian in the Middle Ages had a
" definite vision," and wished "to make the
whole world like that vision," or, perhaps it
would be more true to say he wished to keep
the whole world like that vision. His condition
wa
that he thought his vision so good that
94

The Eterncil Repetition

he was prepared to burn men alive rather
than they should move away from it. But the
vision that inspires modern progress is not so
much the vision of better things to come as
the vision of bad things that now exist. The
Rationalist does not find it necessary to have
an exact vision of the sort of healthy dwellings
that will be erected on the site of the slum to
convince him that slums are an abomination.
He does not worry his head about what he will
do when he has recovered from an illness before
he has sent for the doctor. The vision of
things that exist may be quite as inspiring, and
often is more inspiring, than the vision of
things that do not exist. I t is the vision of a
miserable man who exists that moves men to
try and make him happy, not the vision of the
happiness which he does not possess.
Progress will not come by dreaming of it
but by working for it. And it is a fact as plain
as the nose on my face that such progress as
has been made has been made much more by a
grim consciousness of realities than by an airy
vision of possibilities.
Mr. Chesterton wants to make men dream
95

A uth,ordoxy

in order to make them move. I t is not sur-
prising if they go to sleep in order to dream.
But the Rationalist wants to wake men up in
order to make them move.
Mr. Chesterton says to the slum dweller:
" Try and have a fixed vision of a pleasant and
clean and airy and beautiful home. It will
inspire you so much." And the Rationalist
says to the slum dweller: "Take a look at
this room of yours, and when you have seen
the dirt of years that is a part of it, and when
you have taken a good look at that bed whereon
you and your wife and your two children are
huddled together at night because there is not
room for another, even if you had the money
to get it, and when you have got it well
into your head that somewhere there is a
man who is living in wealth and plenty by
poisoning and putrifying and slowly murder-
ing you and thousands of people like you in
holes like this-then tell me, how long are you
going to stand it?" I do not think there
will be much dispute as to which is the more
practically inspiring of these two methods.
The Eternal Revolution of Mr. Chesterton's
9 6

The Ete1"nal Repetition

philosophy is not a revolution at all; it is a
repetItIon. It is a repetition that was re-
peated for more than seventeen hundred years,
and, at the end of that time, the only progress
it had made was a progression from bad to
worse. Since then all the things that Mr.
Chesterton hates - doubt, inquiry, dull
methodical research, rooting about in the
in tricacies of things-all these things have been
going on, and from them has come a tendency
that is gradually rising into a triumph, and
which has done more for the happiness and
freedom of mankind than religion did in all
the years of its domination.
Mr. Chesterton is fond of having a fixed
test. The demand for a fixed test is a mere
ruse to get the Rationalist to make his own
coffin. There can no more be a fixed test by
which to judge every detail of the com plica ted
processes of human emanci pa tion than there
can be one test by which to discover whether
milk is good and whether a sovereign is good.
But, in so far as any standard of judgment is
possible, there is an old standard that I learned
in a Sunday School that will do as well as
G 97

A Uth01
doxy

any other. "By their fruits ye shall know
them. "
Judged by that, which is its own standard,
Christianity must be found wanting by every
man who does not believe that j udgmen t, like
justice, should be blind. Weighed in that,
which is its own balance, Christianity must be
found wanting by every man who does not
tamper with the scales.

9 8

CHAPTER IX-Tlte Realisrr
Of OTthodoxy

T HE purpose of that chapter of Mr.
Chesterton's book which is headed
"The Romance of Orthodoxy" is,
he explains, to show that the ideas of the
modern free-thinker are" definitely illiberal."
The chapter begins with one of those wordy
exercises to lead up to a point that Mr. Chester-
ton is so fond of. U nfortuna tely, however,
when we have been led up to the point we dis-
cover that there is no point. The chief defect
of our age, we are told, is not bustle and
strenuousness, but laziness and fatigue.
"Take one quite external case," says l\1r.
Chesterton. "The streets are noisy with
taxi-cabs and motor-cars; but this is not due
to human activity but to human repose. There
would be less bustle if there were more
activity, if people were simply walking about."
The fact is that we ride in taxi-cabs and motor-
omnibuses not because we are too lazy to walk,
but because we are too active to walk. If it is
my duty to keep six appointments in the course
99

A uthordoxy

of the day, and I walk to the first two of them,
which are at opposite ends of London, I shall
ha ve to miss the other four. And if I happen
to be employed by a business man who sends
me out to make these calls I shall find, when I
return to his office, that he by no means agrees
with Mr. Chesterton that I have put in an
exceedingly active day. When one has no
resp.onsibility one can idle. You may see the
butcher's errand boy with his bicycle propped
against some wall while he plays marbles,
boisterously indifferent to the business of the
butcher, and the cooks' of his customers. You
will see a man taking his children for a walk
across Hampstead Heath on a Sunday morn-
ing; but you will not see him taking a walk
to the City on Monday morning. He does
not walk on Sunday because he feels particu-
larly active, any more than he rides on Monday
because he feels particularly lazy. He conducts
himself in a reasonable fashion, and so he thinks
it would be silly to ride across Hampstead
Heath on a Sunday when he has nothing to do
after being shut up in some office for a week;
just as he knows that if he walked to the City

100
. . :,
)
- ('.
.,.).. if
.
'I'" n
l- L. 1\ AI.... Y ,,"\

The Reali8m of Orrthodoxy

on a lVlonday he would be indulging himself
with a selfish vvaste of energy.
IVIr. Chesterton has tried to prove the times
are not strenuous, and he has only succeeded
in proving that they are not slow. He has
attempted to show that the modern man is a
laggard, and he has demonstrated that he is a
labourer.
This sort of thing is always happening to
Mr. Chesterton. There is another exam pIe
of it on the very next page. "It is often sug-
gested that all Liberals ought to be free-
thinkers, because they ought to love everything
that is free." This statement having been
made, some space is devoted to refuting it.
But it did not need refuting because it was
never said-except by Mr. Chesterton. To
say that all Liberals ought to be free-thinkers
beca use they ought to love everything that is
free is to talk the arrant rubbish which free-
thinkers are given to talking in l\1r. Chester-
ton's pages, but which is notably absent from
their conversation elsewhere. To be a Liberal
means, in one aspect of the matter, not to
believe in everything free. But to be a Liberal
101

A uthordoxy

does mean to believe in freedom of thought.
And the Catholic Church, knowing more about
these things than Mr. Chesterton, has a common
name for all believers in freedom of thought.
Throughout Europe, and throughout the
world, she calls them-Liberals.
Mr. Chesterton says: "In actual modern
Europe a free-thinker does not mean a man
who thinks for himself. It means a man who,
having thought for himself, has come to one
particular class of conclusions. . . ."
This is like saying that an efficient baker is
really a baking machine, because, having studied
and thought about the various methods of
baking bread, he has come to the conclusion
that a particular class of process is the best.
But this is the very man who will be the first
to give any new method of baking a trial.
When he concluded that a certain process was
the best he knew, he did not also conclude
that no man had ever known or would ever
know abetter.
And because the free-thinker has arrived at
certain conclusions he has not ceased to think
freely. He arrived at those conclusions by
IOZ

The Real1'sm of Orthodoxy

thinking for himself, and he is prepared to
defend, revise, or abandon anyone of them
by the same process of free-thinking. He is
called a free-thinker, not so much because of
his conclusions as because of his method,
which is the reverse method to that of the
Church.
Mr. Chesterton begins to show that the ídeas
of the modern free-thinker are "definitely
illiberal" by telling us about the ideas of the
"liberalizers of theology" who are no more
free-thinkers than Mr. Chesterton. What he
calls "the notes of the new theology or the
modernist church" may be dismissed the issue
for they have nothing to do with it. The
new theology has no more ruthless opponent
than the free-thinker. He understands that
there is a case to be made out for Authority,
and a case to be made out for Reason, and that
there is no case for the elusive theology that
rej ects both.
Coming to what may more properly be
regarded as the ground occupied by the free-
thinker, l\1r. Chesterton is concerned to show
that there is nothing particularly liberal in a
10 3

A Uth01.doxy

denial of miracles. The liberal idea of freedom
is, he thinks, somehow bound up with belief
in the miraculous. We will look at this matter
for a moment.
Wha t is a miracle? Mr. Chesterton's
definition is this: "A miracle simply means
the swift control of matter by mind." It may
be admitted that this meaning is frequently
attached to the word miracle as it is used in
ordinary life. Thus, if a man appears to be
walking to certain death when he crosses a
road and does not notice an approaching motor-
omnibus until it seems to the observer he is too
late, and if that man, with incredible dexterity
both of mind and body at the last moment,
esca pes wi thou t a scratch, some passer-by will
certainly remark that it was a miracle. And
so it was if a miracle is nothing more than
" the swift control of matter by mind."
But this is not the Christian theologian's
idea of a miracle. In comparatively modern
times some theologians have adopted and
expressed this view of some miracles. Old
John Newton, for example, applied it to the
miracle of the feeding of the five thousand in
10 4

The Realism of Orthocloxy

one of the few theological poems that are
grea t poetry :

" Full soon celestially fed
Their rustic fare they take,
'Twas Spring-cime when He blest the bread,
'Twas Harvest when He brake."

But what set the theologians a-seeking these
plausible explanations of miracles? It used
to be the glory of the miraculous that it was
miraculous. Now we are asked to believe that
the great characteristic of miracles is that they
are not miracles.
Mr. Chesterton is concerned to sho"v that a
denial of the miraculous is " definitely illiberal"
rather than to discuss the general question of
miracles. It seems to me that he answers him-
self in this as in many other cases. F or he
says: "If a man cannot believe in miracles
there is an end of the matter; he is not
particularly liberal, but he is perfectly honour-
able and logical, which are much better things."
How can the statement that disbelief in the
miraculous is " definitely illiberal" be recon-
ciled with this?
The case is in need of statement in its
10 5

A uthordoxy

positive aspect. I will therefore endeavour
to show why the man who rejects the
miraculous is more on the side of the liberal
idea of freedom than the man who believes
in it.
The miraculous, not perhaps in the watered
down edition of the new theologians, but cer-
tainly in the Old Testament and in the Catholic
Church, means that there is at the back of this
universe of ours a Person who can do what he
likes with it and with us. And because he is
subject to no law we can never be certain,
while we believe in him, that we may regard
anything as a law at all. He can make the sun
stand still and so put the spheres out of joint;
he can bring forth an evil beast to devour us
in Fleet Street if we laugh at Mr. Chesterton,
just as he sent a couple of beasts to devour a
couple of little children who made fun of
another of his prophets; he can fill our beds
\vith lice and cover our bodies with sores; he
can strike us dead and bring us to life again
three months afterwards-to the great dis-
comfort of the Insurance Companies. These
are some sam pIes of the things the power
106

The Realism of Orthodoxy

above us can do if the real, out-and-out,
view of the miraculous is true. And if these
things could be done" the liberal idea of free-
dom" would be at an end. For the liberal
idea of freedom involves that it shall be possible
to make progress, not indeed without difficulty
and sometimes disaster, but without diffi-
culties and disasters of the sort that I have just
described.
I t is only when he perceives, by some such
crude description as I have written, what the
miraculous is that the average man realizes
that he does, in fact, conduct the whole
business of his life without reference to
su perna tural sanctions and miraculous possi-
bilities.
Mr. Chesterton, who tells us in this book
tha t "the phrases of the street are not only
forcible but subtle" is probably aware that
when the man in the street says of any other
man "God help him" he regards that man
as beyond help.
It is only man that helps man; and it is
because the free-thinker realizes this more
clearly than others that he is a greater.help:to
10 7

A utho'J"doxy

mankind than the man who feels he has always
God to fall back upon in case of emergency.
The liberal idea of freedom is the life of free-
thought. And the liberal idea of freedom will
be the death of Christianity.

108

CHAPTER X-Reason and the
M is- A dvent
lrer

I WAS surprised to find in the concluding
chapter of Mr. Chesterton's book an
appeal to individual experience as an
apologetic. The Rev. Dr. Horton, with whom
Mr. Chesterton has, I think, had words in his
time, says in a recent book of apologetics after
the modernist model: "Tha t apologetic is
barren which meets rationalism with rationalism
and labours to establish an historical reality
independently of a religious experience." When
I read this statement it occurred to me that I
should like to see a duel between Dr. Horton
and IVIr. Chesterton a bou tit, and I was pretty
certain that Mr. Chesterton would win. No
Christian writer I knew of had such a healthy
contempt for the statement that is a common
cant of the modernists, that we must refer
back the appeal as to the credentials of Chris-
tianity from history to something called
" religious experience."
And now my dream of seeing Dr. Horton
10 9

A uthordoxy

and Mr. Chesterton engaged in this duel is over.
For Mr. Chesterton has to this extent gone
over to the modernists that he says his evidences
for Christianity are made up "of loose but
living experiences." It is true that he also
calls these loose but living experiences "an
enormous accumulation of small but unani-
mous facts." It is just possible that he intends
to appeal to them as facts and not as experi-
ences, at all events in the modernist sense of
the latter word. But this is not clear in the
book, and I come at the end of my examina-
tion of it to the expression of an opinion that
has been growing slowly as I have gone through
it, that for all his rampant orthodoxy Mr.
Chesterton is a little bit of a heretic.
I do not intend to pursue what seem to be
the beginnings of something that is not ortho-
doxy in Mr. Chesterton, but to suppose that I
am misled by-what may be an unconsidered
phrase, and to proceed to the end treating Mr.
Chesterton as the most orthodox of all the
Christians.
I am sorry to say that the" loose but living
experiences" and the "enormous accum ula-
110

Reason a1
d the lJIis- Adventurer

tion of small but unanimous facts" that are
1\1r. Chesterton's" evidences for Christianity"
have eluded me in this book until now, and I
have looked for them many times in this last
chapter to which they rightly belong, but
without finding them. Mr. Chesterton says
that when he looked at various anti-Christian
tru ths he found they were not true. But his
finding them untrue does not help us very
much. He thinks, he believes, that Chris-
tianity is true. I think and believe that it is
false. He thinks it is the hope of the world. I
think the world's hope is that it is passing
away. Who is to decide between us ?
We are both qui te sincere, both qui te
honourable in our opinions; but which of us
is right? I am afraid the only way of deciding
that is to appeal to the facts. That is what
Mr. Chesterton does not do. He appeals to
his view of the facts to support his view of the
facts and, of course, his appeal is successful.
Or he appeals to what he alleges to be the
Rationalist's view of the facts to show that it
is a particularly stupid and short-sighted view
of them. And so it often is. Only it isn't the
III

A uthordoxy

Rationalist's. The one thing that Mr. Chester-
ton never does in this book is to deal with facts
as distinct from his own or some one else's
impressions of them. It does not help me to
be told that Mr. Smith thinks the Marble
Arch beautiful, and that Mr. Jones thinks it
ugly, if I am trying to find out what was the
origin of the thing, who erected it, and why,
and when. Similarly it does not help me to
be told that it is an anti-Christian argument
that man is "a mere variety of the animal
kingdom" if I am out to discover what are the
evidences that he is possessed of an immortal
soul ?
In all his treatment of facts Mr. Chesterton
never lets them speak for themselves. "The
ordinary agnostic," he says, " has got his facts
all wrong." He gives us a bunch of these facts
that are "all \vrong." Here they are: "He"
-the ordinary agnostic-" doubts because the
Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't;
because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it
isn't; because miracles do not happen, but
they do; because monks were lazy, but they
were very industrious; because nuns are un-
112

Reason and the .Jfis-Advwnturer

happy, but they are particularly cheerful;
because Christian art was sad and pale, but it
was picked out in peculiarly bright colours and
gay with gold; because modern science is
moving away from the supernatural, but it
isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural
with the rapidity of a railway train."
Without admitting for a moment that any
man ever became an agnostic for such a reason
as that he thought nuns are unhappy, without
admitting that any of these reasons are good,
bad, or indifferent, let us look at the treatment
of facts in this passage. One example may
suffice. Mr. Chesterton says the lVliddle Ages
were not barbaric. The moment a man
begins to look into the matter he is faced with
this fact, that the l\1iddle Ages were much
worse than the Catholic believes them to have
been, much better than the neo- Protestan t
will allow them to have been, and, in their evil
features, exactly what the Rationalist has always
held them to be, i.e. an exhibition of Chris-
tiani ty at the zenith of its power over the
human mind. And to deny the darkness of
the Dark Ages by the simple assertion that
H 113

A utlwrdoxy

they were not dark is not argument, it IS
dogmatic impudence. Did Lecky think the
Middle Ages were not dark and backward
because he admitted that, on its ethical side,
some of the teaching of the Church made for
light in the darkness? Does Mr. Hyndman
think the lVliddle Ages were not dark and back-
ward because he recognizes that on its economic
side Catholicism was much superior to the
Protestantism that began by the profession of
a desire to purify the monasteries, and ended
with the wholesale plunder of the poor?
I don't know what Mr. Chesterton calls
evidence. But if every historian who had no
special religious axe to grind can be believed,
if the papers, the State Papers and the private
correspondence and diaries of the period can
be believed, in a word, if there is any credence
to be attached to contemporary testimony,
the Middle Ages were the dark Ages. And with
due respect to Mr. Chesterton's weight as a
controversialist I venture to tell him that his
reply to all this-" they wern't "-is not in
the least effective. We should like to believe
him, but history will not allow us to do so.
114

Reason and tl
e
JIis-Advent
lrer

If you examine all the other reasons that
are given why agnostics do not believe, you
will not find a single one of them to which the
objection noted above does not apply. The
objection, that is to say, that we have only
Mr. Chesterton's definition of the agnostic's
position, and only 11r. Chesterton's word that
it is wrong.
The time has come to make an end of these
very discursive observations on the orthodoxy
expounded by Mr. Chesterton. I will there-
fore now endeavour by way of conclusion to
set out what appears to me to be the defects
of the book Orthodoxy as an apologetic for
Chris tiani ty.
As an apologetic for Christianity Orthodoxy
is at once the very best and the very worst
that has been written in recent times. It is
the very best, because there is in the vigour
and valour of the style of it, and in the wit and
whimsicality of the phrasing of it, and in the
candour and confidence of it, something which
is lacking from all the merely theological
apologetics I ever read, namely, the sense that
here is an honest man searching and not merely
lIS

A uthordoxy

a professional expositor describing the goal of
the search. From first to last in these pages
we never lose touch with a provokingly human
personality. And so the very manner in which
the book is written sets up an unconscious bias
in the author's favour, and, I make no doubt,
makes him a great asset to the clergy who, poor
gentlemen, do not put anything like such
cheerful faith in the sta bili ty of their pro-
fession as he does. This book is the best thing
tha t has happened during the religious con-
flicts of our times, because it gives the young
Christian and the young sceptic the impression
that they are having a glorious, clean, stand-up
fight. And so it leaves a very deep sense of the
manliness and the sincerity of the Christian in
the mind of the young sceptic. This is what
the bulk of the Christian apologists have never
done. They have never fought fair. There is
a dispute about a thing. " Very well," says
Mr. Chesterton, " we'll have a drink together,
and I'll fight you for it." And he fights like a
man. The average Christian apologist never
fought, or, if he could not save his face with-
out making an appearance of fighting, he
116

Reason and tlte .Jfis-Adventurer

secreted a knife in his glove, and bolted in the
excitement caused by the unexpected fall of
his opponent.
In its lusty manliness Mr. Chesterton's
book may be called the best apologetic for
Christianity that has been written in recent
times.
But it is also the worst apologetic because
its defects, if they are more lovable defects
than those of, say, the Rev. Dr. Torrey, are
also more obvious and more fundamental. In
a row of second-rate dowdy houses you prob-
ably would not notice if one of them had a
broken window upstairs. You would have no
reason for looking at their windows. But you
could not help noticing a broken window at
Peter Robinson's or the Stores. What Mr.
Chesterton says to the Rationalist is something
like this: "Come and have a look at these
windows of mine. See how I have managed to
get into them the antique and the novel, the
grave and the gay; see how I have contrived
to suggest at once a battle-field and a banquet,
a campaign and a cottage; remark how I
have put in laughter, but not the laughter of
117

A uthordoxlJ

lunacy; and tears, but not the tears of despair;
observe, in a word, that these windows of mine
show forth in all its happily conflicting aspects
the mystery of my religion. And, mark you
this, that mystery is inviolate and eternal.
F or this glass of the windows in which it is all
displayed is the most ancient glass in the world.
It is called Faith, and it can never be broken."
And the Rationalist, not without a little regret
at disturbing the equanimity of so amiable a
gentleman, ventures to draw his attention to
the fact that, incredible as it may seem, some
one has thrown half a brick through one of the
windows, shattering the glass that could never
be broken, and disturbing the goods that could
never be moved.
I have said that the defects of this apologetic
are not only obvious-like a broken window at
Peter Robinson's-but fundamental.
The fundamental error of Mr. Chesterton is
that he never goes down to fundamentals. He
is, in a manner that is rather difficult to put
into words, deeply superficial. He deals with
fundamen tals as if they were superficial, and
with superficialities as if they were funda-
118
_.

Reason ctnd the Jfis-Ad'oenture'r

mental. He takes a sledge-hammer to kill a
flea, and a little box of insect powder to arrest
a plague. He talks too much to be con-
vincing. He never leaves us with a period for
reflection between his talks. He is a hustler,
hurrying, coaxing, chaffing, cheering, driving,
dragging us on, until he lands us breathless in
the church porch. And the moment we have
got our wind vve clear out of the porch again,
and we say to Mr. Chesterton something like
this: "What's the hurry ? You have brought
us a very long way, and over a lot of strange
territory, and we have not had a wash all the
way. And now, when we are tired and dusty
and rather bewildered by all these things you
have been saying to us as you brought us along,
you want us to go into that church and say it
is the very place that we have been looking for
all our lives. We shall do nothing of the kind.
We shall go back at our leisure over this road
along which you have driven us in your haste;
we shall examine carefully the turnings and the
cross roads; and if we find that by keeping our
feet steadily in one direction we come to the
end again by this church we will go inside. OUf
119

A uthordoxy

presen t notion is that in the commotion of
your company we have, unwittingly on our
part, taken more than one wrong turning."
This is, of course, nothing more than the
impression this book leaves with me person-
ally. I argued myself into Christianity. But
I thought myself out of it. The thing that
Mr. Chesterton's book lacks, the fundamental
lack it seems to me is this, that he does not
appear to have heard of the words of a certain
writer who said: "In quietness and confi-
dence shall be their strength."
Everyone who has thought seriously for
himself knows the value of silence. I t has
been said of human love:

" Ah, not alone is eloquence of speech
The vehicle of passion and of troth,
In an enchanted silence Love may reach
The height of the irrevocable oath."

And I believe if anyone will read Mr. Chester-
ton's book, not in the rush of wild and whirling
argument which seems to be his native air, but
quietly, thinking ou t all these dazzling sentences
and tracking to their inmost cells all these

120

Reason and the JIis-Advent'ltrer

astounding suggestions, he will see less reason
for being a Christian than ever.
Mr. Chesterton shows us orthodoxy as a
citadel erected upon a catch-phrase, a tribunal
based upon a trick. The catch-phrase turns
out to be a lie, and the citadel has fallen to the
ground. The trick is exposed and the tribunal
is no more, and the judge who sat in it is buried
in the wreckage.
With heads erect, a swinging step, and a
new and nobler awe in our hearts we turn from
the complicated ruin of orthodoxy out on to
the broad road of humanity. The air IS
strangely clear and crisp and invigorating; it
is the air of freedom.

THE END

BOOKS BY G. K. CHESTERTON

Orthodoxy

SIXTH EDITION.

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.11Eanchester Guardian.-" Mr. Chesterton has put the
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book. "
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The Works of
Anatole France

IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Uniform.

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"I do not believe that Thorfin Karlsefne was more
astonished and delighted when he discovered America than
I was when, in my sixtieth year, this great literary luminary
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writing about Anatole France. I want to help the British
people to enjoy his work; I want them to accord to the
great Frenchman the full justice which I feel he has not yet
received in this country; and I want to ease my soul by
some expression of my own gratitude and admiration. . . .
Of all the famous or popular men alive upon this planet
Anatole France is to me the greatest. There is no writer
to compare to him, and he has few peers amongst the greatest
geniuses of past ages and all climes. . . . 'Penguin
Island' is a masterpiece and a classic. It is, in my opinion,
a greater work than 'Gargantua' or 'Don Quixote' or
, Sartor Resartus' or 'Tristram Shandy.' . . . The laughing,
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Coignard, and, with the exception of the miraculous Hamlet,
there is nothing greater in Shakespeare. These' be brave
words.' I am writing of one of the world's greatest artists
and humorists: of Anatole France, the Master. . . . Then
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Monsieur de la Geritande, which I have read fifty times, and
hope to read a hundred times again. The whole chapter is
one of the most artistic, humorous, human, and exhilarating
achievements in literature. It is alive; it is real; it goes
like a song. There is nothing finer or stronger in the best
comedy work of Shakespeare. . . . Anatole France is a
great man, and there is no living celebrity for whom I have
so much reverence and regard."-ROBERT BLATCHFORD in
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Some Experiences of a New
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