Orthodoxy

First published in .................................................. 1908 Reprinted ................................................................ 1908 Reprinted ................................................................ 1909 Reprinted ................................................................ 1911 Reprinted ................................................................ 1915 Reprinted ................................................................ 1919 Reprinted ................................................................ 1921 Reprinted ................................................................ 1924 Reprinted ................................................................ 1926 First published in "The Week-End Library" in 1927 Reprinted ................................................................ 1934 MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. TO MY MOTHER CONTENTS CHAPTER I.— Introduction in Defence of Everything Else CHAPTER VI.— The Paradoxes of Christianity CHAPTER IX.— Authority and the Adventurer CHAPTER 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…