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ORTHODOXY
BY
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
PREFACE
This book is meant to be a companion to "Heretics," and to
put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics
complained of the book called "Heretics" because it merely criticised
current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.
This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably
affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. The writer has
been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset
Newman in writing his Apologia; he has been forced to be egotistical
only in order to be sincere. While everything else may be different
the motive in both cases is the same. It is the purpose of the writer
to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can
be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it.
The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle
and its answer. It deals first with all the writer's own solitary
and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in
which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology.
The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But if
it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.
Gilbert K. Chesterton.
CONTENTS
I. Introduction in Defence of Everything Else
II. The Maniac
III. The Suicide of Thought
IV. The Ethics of Elfland
V. The Flag of the World
VI. The Paradoxes of Christianity
VII. The Eternal Revolution
VIII. The Romance of Orthodoxy
IX. Authority and the Adventurer
ORTHODOXY
I INTRODUCTION IN DEFENCE OF EVERYTHING ELSE
THE only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer
to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.
When some time ago I published a series of hasty but sincere papers,
under the name of "Heretics," several critics for whose intellect
I have a warm respect (I may mention specially Mr. G.S.Street)
said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm
his cosmic theory, but that I had carefully avoided supporting my
precepts with example. "I will begin to worry about my philosophy,"
said Mr. Street, "when Mr. Chesterton has given us his."
It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person
only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation.
But after all, though Mr. Street has inspired and created this book,
he need not read it. If he does read it, he will find that in
its pages I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set
of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state
the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it
my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it;
and it made me.
I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English
yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England
under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.
I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to
write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes
of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general
impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking
by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which
turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool.
I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you
imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly
was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied
with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero
of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake;
and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could
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