Orthodoxy | Page 3

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The Project Gutenberg Etext of Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

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