Chapter XII: Clearing the Ground for Orthodoxy

G. K. CHESTERTON: A CRITICISM (published anonymously in 1908) was a challenge thrown to the world of letters, for it demanded the recognition of Chesterton as a force to be reckoned with in the modern world. As its title implied, the book was by no means a tribute of sheer admiration and agreement. Gilbert was rebuked for that love of a pun or an effective phrase that sometimes led him into indefensible positions. It was hotly asked of him that he should abandon his unjust attitude toward Ibsen. He was accused of calling himself a Liberal and being in fact a Tory. But even in differing from him the book showed him as of real importance, not least in the sketch given of his life and of the influences that had contributed to the formation of his mind. It did too another thing: it clarified his philosophical position for the world at large. For some time now many had been demanding such a clarification. When G.K. attacked the Utopia of Wells and of Shaw, both Wells and Shaw had been urgent in their demands that he should play fair by setting forth his own Utopia. When he attacked the fundamental philosophy of G. S. Street, Mr. Street retorted that it would be time for him to worry about his philosophy when G.K.'s had been unfolded. (G.K.'s retort to this was _Orthodoxy_!)

_G. K. Chesterton: a Criticism_--far the best book that has ever been written about Chesterton--showed at last a mind that had really grasped his philosophy and could even have outlined his Utopia. Perhaps this was the less surprising as it ultimately turned out to have been written by his brother Cecil.

I do not know at what stage Cecil revealed his authorship, but I remember that at first Frances told me only that they suspected Cecil because it was from the angle of his opinions that the book criticised many of Gilbert's. However, I was at that date only an acquaintance and the truth may still have been a family secret. At any rate Cecil it was, and it is small wonder if after all those years of arguing he understood something of the man with whom he had been measuring forces. But he did better than that--for he explained him to others without ever having resort to these arguments, which after all were more or less private property. He explained G.K.'s general philosophy from the _Napoleon_, his ideas of cosmic good from _The Wild Knight_ and _The Man Who Was Thursday_, which had just been published that same year, 1908.

In this last fantastic story the group of anarchists (distinguished by being called after the days of the week) turn out, through a series of incredible adventures to be, all save one, detectives in disguise. The gigantic figure of Sunday before whom they all tremble turns from the chief of the anarchists, chief of the destructive forces, into--what? The sub-title, "A Nightmare," is needed, for Sunday would seem to be some wild vision, seen in dreams, not merely of forces of good, of sanity, of creation, but even of God Himself.

When, almost twenty years later, _The Man Who Was Thursday_ was adapted for the stage,* Chesterton said in an interview:

[* By Ralph Neale and Mrs. Cecil Chesterton.]

In an ordinary detective tale the investigator discovers that some
amiable-looking fellow who subscribes to all the charities, and is
fond of animals, has murdered his grandmother, or is a trigamist. I
thought it would be fun to make the tearing away of menacing masks
reveal benevolence.

Associated with that merely fantastic notion was the one that there
is actually a lot of good to be discovered in unlikely places, and
that we who are fighting each other may be all fighting on the right
side. I think it is quite true that it is just as well we do not,
while the fight is on, know all about each other; the soul must be
solitary; or there would be no place for courage.

A rather amusing thing was said by Father Knox on this point. He
said that he should have regarded the book as entirely pantheist and
as preaching that there was good in everything if it had not been for
the introduction of the one real anarchist and pessimist. But he was
prepared to wager that if the book survives for a hundred years--which
it won't--they will say that the real anarchist was put in afterwards
by the priests.

But, though I was more foggy about ethical and theological matters
than I am now, I was quite clear on that issue; that there was a
final adversary, and that you might find a man resolutely turned away
from goodness.

People have asked me whom I mean by Sunday. Well, I think, on the
whole, and allowing for the fact that he is a person in a tale--I
think you can take him to stand for Nature as distinguished from God.
Huge, boisterous, full of vitality, dancing with a hundred legs,
bright with the glare of the sun, and at first sight, somewhat
regardless of us and our desires.

There is a phrase used at the end, spoken by Sunday: "Can ye drink
from the cup that I drink of?" which seems to mean that Sunday is
God. That is the only serious note in the book, the face of Sunday
changes, you tear off the mask of Nature and you find God.

Monsignor Knox* has called _The Man Who Was Thursday_ "an extraordinary book, written as if the publisher had commissioned him to write something rather like the Pilgrim's Progress in the style of the Pickwick Papers"--which explains perhaps why some reviewers called it irreverent. The very wildness of it conveys a sense of thoughts seething and straining in an effort to express the inexpressible. Later in his more definitely philosophical books G.K. could say calmly much that here he splashes "on a ten leagued canvas with brushes of comet's hair"--with all the violent directness of a vision.

[* In the panegyric preached at Westminster Cathedral, June 27, 1936.]

Of that vision his brother began the interpretation in his challenging book. Reactions were interesting, for even those who wanted most ardently to say that Cecil's book should not have been written found that it was necessary to say it loudly and to say it at great length. Their very violence showed their sense of Chesterton as a peril even when they abused anyone who felt him to be a portent. It was not the kind of contempt that is really bestowed on the contemptible.

The _Academy_ expended more than two columns saying;

We propose to deal with the quack and leave his sycophants and
lickspittles to themselves . . .

One skips him in his numerous corners of third and fourth rate
journals [e.g. _The Illustrated London News_, _The Bookman_, _Daily
News_!] and one avoids his books because they are always and
inevitably a bore.

Lancelot Bathurst had also dared to write of G.K. in his Daily life as a journalist, so the article goes on:

Let us kneel with the Hon. Lancelot at his greasy burgundy-stained
shrine, what time the jingling hansom waits us with its rolling
occupant and his sword-stick and his revolver and his pockets stacked
with penny dreadfuls. . . .

The fact is we have in Mr. Chesterton the true product of the
deboshed hapenny press. . . . If the hapenny papers ceased to notice
him forthwith it seems to us more than probable that he would cease
at once to be of the highest importance in literary circles and the
Bishops and Members of Parliament who have honoured him with their
kind notice would be compelled to drop him. . . .

Most of the reviews were very different from this one, which is certainly great fun (although some few other reviewers suggested that Gilbert himself wrote the _Criticism_). I have wondered whether the _Academy_ notices of his own books, all much like this, were written by a personal enemy or merely by one of the "jolly people" as he often called them who were maddened by his views.

For some years now Gilbert had been gathering in his mind the material for _Orthodoxy_. Some of the ideas we have seen faintly traced in the Notebook and _The Coloured Lands_, but they all grew to maturity in the atmosphere of constant controversy. In a controversy with the Rev. R. J. Campbell we see, for instance, his convictions about the reality of sin shaping under our eyes. Discussing Modernism in the _Nation_, he analyses the difference between the true development of an idea and the mere changing from one idea to another. Modernism claiming to be a development was actually an abandonment of the Christian idea.

For the Catholic, this is among the most interesting of his controversies. In the course of it he refers to "the earlier works of Newman and the literature of the Oxford Movement" to support his view of the Anglican position. I have already said that Chesterton read far more than was usually supposed, because he read so quickly and with so little parade of learning, and it has been too lightly assumed that the statement in _Orthodoxy_ that he avoided works of Christian Apologetic meant that he had not read any of the great Christian writers of the past. True, he was not then or at any time reading books of Apologetic. He must, however, have been reading something more life-giving, as we learn from a single hint. Asked to draw up a Scheme of Reading for 1908 in _G.K.'s Weekly_, he suggests Butler's _Analogy_, Coleridge's _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_, Newman's _Apologia_, St. Augustine's _Confessions_ and the _Summa_ of St. Thomas Aquinas.

It was absurd, he said in this article, to suppose that the ancients did not see our modern problems. The truth was that the great ancients not only saw them, but saw through them. Butler had sketched the "real line along which Christianity must ultimately be defended." These great writers all remained modern, while the "New Theology" takes one back to the time of crinolines. "I almost expect to see Mr. R. J. Campbell in peg-top trousers, with very long side-whiskers."

In this controversy, although not yet a Catholic, he showed the gulf between the Modernist theory of development and the Newman doctrine, with a clarity greater than any Catholic writer of the time.

A man who is always going back and picking to pieces his own first
principles may be having an amusing time but he is not developing as
Newman understood development. Newman meant that if you wanted a tree
to grow you must plant it finally in some definite spot. It may be (I
do not know and I do not care) that Catholic Christianity is just now
passing through one of its numberless periods of undue repression and
silence. But I do know this, that when the great Powers break forth
again, the new epics and the new arts, they will break out on the
ancient and living tree. They cannot break out upon the little shrubs
that you are always pulling up by the roots to see if they are
growing.

Against R. J. Campbell he showed in a lecture on "Christianity and Social Reform" how belief in sin as well as in goodness was more favourable to social reform than was the rather woolly optimism that refused to recognize evil. "The nigger-driver will be delighted to hear that God is immanent in him. . . . The sweater that . . . he has not in any way become divided from the supreme perfection of the universe." If the New Theology would not lead to social reform, the social Utopia to which the philosophy of Wells and of Shaw was pointing seemed to Chesterton not a heaven on earth to be desired, but a kind of final hell to be avoided, since it banished all freedom and human responsibility. Arguing with them was again highly fruitful, and two subjects he chose for speeches are suggestive--"The Terror of Tendencies" and "Shall We Abolish the Inevitable?"

In the _New Age_ Shaw wrote about Belloc and Chesterton and so did Wells, while Chesterton wrote about Wells and Shaw, till the Philistines grew angry, called it self-advertisement and log-rolling and urged that a Bill for the abolition of Shaw and Chesterton should be introduced into Parliament. But G.K. had no need for advertisement of himself or his ideas just then: he had a platform, he had an eager audience. Every week he wrote in the _Illustrated London News_, beginning in 1905 to do "Our Notebook" (this continued till his death in 1936). He was still writing every Saturday in the _Daily News_. Publishers were disputing for each of his books. Yet he rushed into every religious controversy that was going on, because thereby he could clarify and develop his ideas.

The most important of all these was the controversy with Blatchford, Editor of the _Clarion_, who had written a rationalist Credo, entitled _God and My Neighbour_. In 1903-4, he had the generosity and the wisdom to throw open the _Clarion_ to the freest possible discussion of his views. The Christian attack was made by a group of which Chesterton was the outstanding figure, and was afterwards gathered into a paper volume called _The Doubts of Democracy_.

One essay in this volume, written in 1903, is of primary importance in any study of the sources of _Orthodoxy_, for it gives a brilliant outline of one of the main contentions of the book and shows even better than _Orthodoxy_ itself what he meant by saying that he had first learnt Christianity from its opponents. It is clear that by now he believed in the Divinity of Christ. The pamphlet itself has fallen into oblivion and Chesterton's share of it was only three short essays. I think it well to quote a good deal from the first of these, because in it he has put in concentrated form and with different illustrations what he developed five years later. There is nothing more packed with thought in the whole of his writings than these essays.

The first of all the difficulties that I have in controverting Mr.
Blatchford is simply this, that I shall be very largely going over
his own ground. My favourite text-book of theology is _God and My
Neighbour_, but I cannot repeat it in detail. If I gave each of my
reasons for being a Christian, a vast number of them would be Mr.
Blatchford's reasons for not being one.

For instance, Mr. Blatchford and his school point out that there
are many myths parallel to the Christian story; that there were Pagan
Christs, and Red Indian Incarnations, and Patagonian Crucifixions,
for all I know or care. But does not Mr. Blatchford see the other
side of the fact? If the Christian God really made the human race,
would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the
Christian God? If the centre of our life is a certain fact, would not
people far from the centre have a muddled version of that fact? If we
are so made that a Son of God must deliver us, is it odd that
Patagonians should dream of a Son of God?

The Blatchfordian position really amounts to this--that because a
certain thing has impressed millions of different people as likely or
necessary, therefore it cannot be true. And then this bashful being,
veiling his own talents, convicts the wretched G.K.C. of paradox . . .

The story of a Christ is very common in legend and literature. So
is the story of two lovers parted by Fate. So is the story of two
friends killing each other for a woman. But will it seriously be
maintained that, because these two stories are common as legends,
therefore no two friends were ever separated by love or no two lovers
by circumstances? It is tolerably plain, surely, that these two
stories are common because the situation is an intensely probable and
human one, because our nature is so built as to make them almost
inevitable . . .

Thus, in this first instance, when learned sceptics come to me and
say, "Are you aware that the Kaffirs have a sort of Incarnation?" I
should reply: "Speaking as an unlearned person, I don't know. But
speaking as a Christian, I should be very much astonished if they
hadn't."

Take a second instance. The Secularist says that Christianity has
been a gloomy and ascetic thing, and points to the procession of
austere or ferocious saints who have given up home and happiness and
macerated health and sex. But it never seems to occur to him that the
very oddity and completeness of these men's surrender make it look
very much as if there were really something actual and solid in the
thing for which they sold themselves. They gave up all pleasures for
one pleasure of spiritual ecstasy. They may have been mad; but it
looks as if there really were such a pleasure. They gave up all human
experiences for the sake of one superhuman experience. They may have
been wicked, but it looks as if there were such an experience.

It is perfectly tenable that this experience is as dangerous and
selfish a thing as drink. A man who goes ragged and homeless in order
to see visions may be as repellant and immoral as a man who goes
ragged and homeless in order to drink brandy. That is a quite
reasonable position. But what is manifestly not a reasonable
position, what would be, in fact, not far from being an insane
position, would be to say that the raggedness of the man, and the
stupefied degradation of the man, proved that there was no such thing
as brandy. That is precisely what the Secularist tries to say. He
tries to prove that there is no such thing as supernatural experience
by pointing at the people who have given up everything for it. He
tries to prove that there is no such thing by proving that there are
people who live on nothing else.

Again I may submissively ask: "Whose is the Paradox?" . . .

Take a third instance. The Secularist says that Christianity
produced tumult and cruelty. He seems to suppose that this proves it
to be bad. But it might prove it to be very good. For men commit
crimes not only for bad things, far more often for good things. For
no bad things can be desired quite so passionately and persistently
as good things can be desired, and only very exceptional men desire
very bad and unnatural things.

Most crime is committed because, owing to some peculiar
complication, very beautiful or necessary things are in some
danger . . .

. . . And when something is set before mankind that is not only
enormously valuable, but also quite new, the sudden vision, the
chance of winning it, the chance of losing it, drive them mad. It has
the same effect in the moral world that the finding of gold has in
the economic world. It upsets values, and creates a kind of cruel
rush.

We need not go far for instances quite apart from the instances of
religion. When the modern doctrines of brotherhood and liberality
were preached in France in the eighteenth century the time was ripe
for them, the educated classes everywhere had been growing towards
them, the world to a very considerable extent welcomed them. And yet
all that preparation and openness were unable to prevent the burst of
anger and agony which greets anything good. And if the slow and
polite preaching of rational fraternity in a rational age ended in
the massacres of September, what an _a fortiori_ is here! What would
be likely to be the effect of the sudden dropping into a dreadfully
evil century of a dreadfully perfect truth? What would happen if a
world baser than the world of Sade were confronted with a gospel
purer than the gospel of Rousseau?

The mere flinging of the polished pebble of Republican idealism
into the artificial lake of eighteenth century Europe produced a
splash that seemed to splash the heavens, and a storm that drowned
ten thousand men. What would happen if a star from heaven really fell
into the slimy and bloody pool of a hopeless and decaying humanity?
Men swept a city with the guillotine, a continent with a sabre,
because Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were too precious to be
lost. How if Christianity was yet more maddening because it was yet
more precious?

But why should we labour the point when One who knew human nature
as it can really be learnt, from fishermen and women and natural
people, saw from his quiet village the track of this truth across
history, and, in saying that He came to bring not peace but a sword,
set up eternally His colossal realism against the eternal
sentimentality of the Secularist?

Thus, then, in the third instance, when the learned sceptic says:
"Christianity produced wars and persecutions," we shall reply:
"Naturally."

And, lastly, let me take an example which leads me on directly to
the general matter I wish to discuss for the remaining space of the
articles at my command. The Secularist constantly points out that the
Hebrew and Christian religions began as local things; that their god
was a tribal god; that they gave him material form, and attached him
to particular places.

This is an excellent example of one of the things that if I were
conducting a detailed campaign I should use as an argument for the
validity of Biblical experience. For if there really are some other
and higher beings than ourselves, and if they in some strange way, at
some emotional crisis, really revealed themselves to rude poets or
dreamers in very simple times, that these rude people should regard
the revelation as local, and connect it with the particular hill or
river where it happened, seems to me exactly what any reasonable
human being would expect. It has a far more credible look than if
they had talked cosmic philosophy from the beginning. If they had, I
should have suspected "priestcraft" and forgeries and third-century
Gnosticism.

If there be such a being as God, and He can speak to a child, and
if God spoke to a child in the garden, the child would, of course,
say that God lived in the garden. I should not think it any less
likely to be true for that. If the child said: "God is everywhere; an
impalpable essence pervading and supporting all constituents of the
Cosmos alike"--if, I say, the infant addressed me in the above terms,
I should think he was much more likely to have been with the
governess than with God.

So if Moses had said God was an Infinite Energy, I should be
certain he had seen nothing extraordinary. As he said He was a
Burning Bush, I think it very likely that he did see something
extraordinary. For whatever be the Divine Secret, and whether or no
it has (as all people have believed) sometimes broken bounds and
surged into our world, at least it lies on the side furthest away
from pedants and their definitions, and nearest to the silver souls
of quiet people, to the beauty of bushes, and the love of one's
native place.

Thus, then, in our last instance (out of hundreds that might be
taken), we conclude in the same way. When the learned sceptic says:
"The visions of the Old Testament were local, and rustic, and
grotesque," we shall answer: "Of course. They were genuine."

Thus, as I said at the beginning, I find myself, to start with,
face to face with the difficulty that to mention the reasons that I
have for believing in Christianity is, in very many cases, simply to
repeat those arguments which Mr. Blatchford, in some strange way,
seems to regard as arguments against it. His book is really rich and
powerful. He has undoubtedly set up these four great guns of which I
have spoken. I have nothing to say against the size and ammunition of
the guns. I only say that by some strange accident of arrangement he
has set up those four pieces of artillery pointing at himself. If I
were not so humane, I should say: "Gentlemen of the Secularist Guard,
fire first."

He goes on in the next essay to talk of the positive arguments for Christianity, of "this religious philosophy which was, and will be again, the study of the highest intellects and the foundation of the strongest nations, but which our little civilisation has for a while forgotten." Very briefly he then deals with Determinism and Freewill, the need for the Supernatural and the question of the Fall. Dealing with the Fall he uses one of his most brilliant illustrations. We speak, he says, of a manly man, but not of a whaley whale. "If you wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky, you would slap him on the back and say, 'Be a man.' No one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap it on the back and say, 'be a crocodile.' For we have no notion of a perfect crocodile; no allegory of a whale expelled from his Whaley Eden."

Continuing the swift sketch of some elements of Christian theology, Chesterton next deals with Miracles. While the development in _Orthodoxy_ makes this section look very slight, there are passages that make one realize the mental wealth of a man who could afford to leave them behind and rush on. Blatchford had said that no English judge would accept the evidence for the resurrection and G.K. answers that possibly Christians have not all got "such an extravagant reverence for English judges as is felt by Mr. Blatchford himself. The experiences of the Founder of Christianity have perhaps left us in a vague doubt of the infallibility of Courts of Law."

In reference to the many rationalists whose refusal to accept any miracle is based on the fact that "Experience is against it," he says: "There was a great Irish Rationalist of this school who when he was told that a witness had seen him commit a murder said that he could bring a hundred witnesses who had not seen him commit it."

The final essay on "The Eternal Heroism of the Slums" has two main points. It begins with an acknowledgment of the crimes of Christians, only pointing out that while Mr. Blatchford outlaws the Church for this reason, he is prepared to invoke the State whose crimes are far worse. But the most vigorous part of the essay is a furious attack on determinism. Blatchford apparently held that bad surroundings inevitably produced bad men. Chesterton had seen the heroism of the poor in the most evil surroundings and was furious at "this association of vice with poverty, the vilest and the oldest and the dirtiest of all the stories that insolence has ever flung against the poor." Men can and do lead heroic lives in the worst of circumstances because there is in humanity a power of responsibility, there is freewill. Blatchford, in the name of humanity, is attacking the greatest of human attributes.

More numerous than can be counted, in all the wars and persecutions
of the world, men have looked out of their little grated windows and
said, "at least my thoughts are free." "No, No," says the face of Mr.
Blatchford, suddenly appearing at the window, "your thoughts are the
inevitable result of heredity and environment. Your thoughts are as
material as your dungeons. Your thoughts are as mechanical as the
guillotine." So pants this strange comforter, from cell to cell.

I suppose Mr. Blatchford would say that in his Utopia nobody would
be in prison. What do I care whether I am in prison or no, if I have
to drag chains everywhere. A man in his Utopia may have, for all I
know, free food, free meadows, his own estate, his own palace. What
does it matter? he may not have his own soul.

An architect once discoursed to me on the need of humility in face of the material; the stone and marble of his building. Thus Chesterton was humble before the reality he was seeking to interpret. Pride, he once defined as "the falsification of fact by the introduction of self." To learn, a man must "subtract himself from the study of any solid and objective thing." This humility he had in a high degree and also that rarer humility which saw his friends and his opponents alike as his intellectual equals. "Almost anybody," Monsignor Knox once said, "was an ordinary person compared with him." But this was an idea that certainly never occurred to him.

The philosophy shaping into _Orthodoxy_ was stimulated by newspaper controversy, and also by the talk in which Gilbert always delighted. As I have noted he loved to listen and he was a little slow in getting off the mark with his own contribution. Many years later an American interviewer described him, when he did get going, as answering questions in brief essays. Frank Swinnerton has admirably described the manner of speech so well remembered by his friends:

His speech is prefaced and accompanied by a curious sort of
humming, such as one may hear when glee singers give each other the
note before starting to sing. He pronounces the word "I" (without
egotism) as if it were "Ayee," and drawls, not in the highly
gentlemanly manner which Americans believe to be the English accent,
and which many English call the Oxford accent, but in a manner
peculiar to himself, either attractive or the reverse according to
one's taste (to me attractive).*

[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 94.]

Even more attractive to most of us was his fashion of making us feel that we had contributed something very worthwhile. He would take something one had said and develop it till it shone and glowed, not from its own worth but from what he had made of it. Almost anything could thus become a starting point for a train of his best thought. And the style disliked by some in his writings was so completely the man himself that it was the same in conversation as in his books. He would approach a topic from every side throwing light on those contradictory elements that made a paradox. He himself had what he attributes to St. Thomas--"that instantaneous presence of mind which alone really deserves the name of wit." Asked once the traditional question what single book he would choose if cast on a desert island, he replied Thomas's _Guide to Practical Shipbuilding_.

In talk, as in his books, G.K. loved to play upon words, and sometimes of course this was merely a matter of words and the puns were bad ones. Once, for instance, after translating the French phrase for playing truant as "he goes to the bushy school--or the school among the bushes," he adds "not lightly to be confounded with the Art School at Bushey." This is indefensible, but rare. Christopher Morley has noted how "his play upon words often led to a genuine play upon thoughts. . . . One of Chesterton's best pleasantries was his remark on the so-called Emancipation of Women. 'Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry _We will not be dictated to:_ and proceeded to become stenographers.'" He complained in a review of a novel "Every modern man is an atlas carrying the world; and we are introduced to a new cosmos with every new character. . . . Each man has to be introduced accompanied by his cosmos, like a jealous wife or on the principle of 'love me love my dogma.'"

Each of Chesterton's readers can think of a hundred instances of this inspired fooling: many have been given in this book and many will yet be given. But the thing went far deeper than fooling: it has been compared by Mr. Belloc to the gospel parables as a method of teaching and of illumination. "He made men see what they had not seen before. He made them _know_. He was an architect of certitude, whenever he practiced the art in which he excelled."

Belloc's analysis of this special element in Chesterton's style, alike written and spoken, is of first rate importance to an understanding of the man whose mind at this date was still rapidly developing while his method of expression had become what it remained to the end of his life.

His unique, his capital, genius for illustration by parallel, by
example, is his peculiar mark. The word "peculiar" is here the
operative word. . . . No one whatsoever that I can recall in the
whole course of English letters had his amazing--I would almost say
superhuman--capacity for parallelism.

Now parallelism is a gift or method of vast effect in the
conveyance of truth.

Parallelism consists in the illustration of some unperceived truth
by its exact consonance with the reflection of a truth already known
and perceived . . .

Whenever Chesterton begins a sentence with, "It is as though" (in
exploding a false bit of reasoning), you may expect a stroke of
parallelism as vivid as a lightning flash.

. . . Always, in whatever manner he launched the parallelism, he
produced the shock of illumination. He _taught_.

Parallelism was so native to his mind; it was so naturally a fruit
of his mental character that he had difficulty in understanding why
others did not use it with the same lavish facility as himself.

I can speak here with experience, for in these conversations with
him or listening to his conversation with others I was always
astonished at an ability in illustration which I not only have never
seen equalled, but cannot remember to have seen attempted. He never
sought such things; they poured out from him as easily as though they
were not the hard forged products of intense vision, but spontaneous
remarks.*

[* _On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters_, pp. 36-41.]

To return to the Blatchford controversy: a final point of interest is a psychological one. G.K. admits his difficulty in using in his arguments the reverent solemnity of the Agnostic. He realizes that he is thought flippant because he is amusing on a subject where he is more certain than "of the existence of the moon. . . . Christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded Rationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery." But if this is his own psychology he faces too the special difficulty of theirs--the main and towering barrier that he wished but hardly hoped to surmount. He was the first person, I think, to see that Free Thought was no longer a young movement, but old and even fossilized. It had formed minds which were now too set to be altered. It had its own dogmas and its own most rigid orthodoxy. "You are armed to the teeth," he told the readers of the _Clarion_, "and buttoned up to the chin with the great agnostic Orthodoxy, perhaps the most placid and perfect of all the orthodoxies of men. . . . I approach you with the reverence and the courage due to a bench of bishops."

The _Clarion_ controversy was, as we have seen, in 1903 and 1904, when Chesterton was approaching thirty. Others of those I have mentioned came later. But I don't think any or even all of them fully explain the depth and richness of _Orthodoxy_.