G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study Part 6

THE RELIGION OF A DEBATER

IN his book on William Blake, Chesterton says that he is "personally quite convinced that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic creed." In course of time, in fact, everybody would have to decide whether they preferred to be an intellectualist or a mystic. A debauch of intellectualism, lasting perhaps nine hundred and fifty years, is a truly terrible thing to contemplate. Perhaps it is safest to a.s.sert that if our lives were considerably lengthened, there would be more mystics and more madmen.

To Chesterton modern thought is merely the polite description of a noisy crowd of persons proclaiming that something or other is wrong. Mr.

Bernard Shaw denounces meat and has been understood to denounce marriage. Ibsen is said to have anathematized almost everything (by those who have not read his works). Mr. MacCabe and Mr. Blatchford think that, on the whole, there is no G.o.d, and Tolstoy told us that nearly everything we did, and quite all we wanted to do, was opposed to the spirit of Christ's teaching. Auberon Herbert disapproved of law, and John Davidson disapproved of life. Herbert Spencer objected to government, Pa.s.sive Resisters to State education, and various educational reformers to education of any description. There are people who would abolish our spelling, our clothing, our food and, most emphatically, our drink. Mr. H. G. Wells adds the finishing touch to this volume of denials, by blandly suggesting in an appendix to his Modern Utopia, headed "Scepticism of the Instrument," that our senses are so liable to err, that we can never be really sure of anything at all. This spirit of denial is extraordinarily infectious. A man begins to suspect what he calls the "supernatural." He joins an ethical society, and before he knows where he is, he is a vegetarian. The rebellious moderns have a curious tendency to flock together in self-defence, even when they have nothing in common. The mere aggregation of denials rather attracts the slovenly and the unattached.

The lack of positive dogma expressed by such a coalition encourages the sceptic and the uneducated, who do not realize that the deliberate suppression of dogma is itself a dogma of extreme arrogance. We trust too much to the label, nowadays, and the brief descriptions we attach to ourselves have a gradually increasing connotation. In politics for example, the conservative creed, which originally contained the single article that aristocracy, wealth and government should be in the same few hands, now also implies adhesion to the economic doctrine of protection, and the political doctrine that unitary government is preferable to federal. The liberal creed, based princ.i.p.ally upon opposition to the conservative, and to a lesser degree upon disrespect for the Established Church, has been enlarged concurrently with the latter. The average liberal or conservative now feels himself in honour bound to a.s.sert or to deny political dogmas out of sheer loyalty to his party. This does not make for sanity. The only political creed in which a man may reasonably expect to remain sane is Socialism, which is catholic and not the least dependent upon other beliefs. Apart from the inconsiderable number of Socialists, the average politician follows in the footsteps of those gentlemen already mentioned. He is not allowed to believe, so he contents himself with a denial of the other side's promises. a.s.sertion is infinitely more brain-wearing than denial.

Side by side with the increase in those who deny is a growth in the numbers of those who come to regard apathy, suspended judgment, or a lack of interest in a religious matter as a state of positive belief.

There are agnostics quite literally all over the place. Belief peters down into acceptance, acceptance becomes a probability, a probability declines into a reasonable doubt, and a reasonable doubt drifts into "it is highly conjectural and indeed extremely unlikely," or something of that sort. Tolerance was once an instrument for ensuring that truth should not be suppressed; it is now an excuse for refusing to bother.

There is, in fact, a growing disrespect for truth. A great many men went to the stake years ago rather than admit the possibility that they were wrong; they protested, so far as human endurance allowed them to protest, that they were orthodox and that their persecutors, and not they, were the heretics. To-day a bunch of Cambridge men calls itself "The Heretics" and imagines it has found a clever t.i.tle. At the same time there is an apparent decline in the power to believe. The average politician (the princ.i.p.al type of twentieth-century propagandist) hardly ever makes a speech which does not contain one at least of the following phrases:

"I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that . . ."

"We are all subject to correction, but as far as we know . . ."

"In this necessarily imperfect world . . ."

"So far as one is able to judge . . ."

"Appearances are notoriously deceptive, but . . ."

"Human experience is necessarily limited to . . ."

"We can never be really sure . . ."

"Pilate asked, 'What is truth?' Ah, my brethren, what indeed?"

"The best minds of the country have failed to come to an agreement on this question; one can only surmise . . ."

"Art is long and life is short. Art to-day is even longer than it used to be."

Now the politician, to do him justice, has retained the courage of his convictions to a greater extent than the orthodox believer in G.o.d. Men are still prepared to make Home Rule the occasion of bloodshed, or to spend the midnight hours denouncing apparent political heresies. But whereas the politician, like the orthodox believer once p.r.o.nounced apologetics, they now merely utter apologies. To-day, equipped as never before with the heavy artillery of argument in the shape of Higher Criticism, research, blue-books, statistics, cheap publications, free libraries, accessible information, public lectures, and goodness only knows what else, the fighting forces of the spiritual and temporal decencies lie drowsing as in a club-room, placarded "Religion and politics must not be discussed here."

All this, with the exception of the political references, is a summary of Chesterton's claim that a return to orthodoxy is desirable and necessary. It will be found at length in _Heretics_ and in the first chapters of _Orthodoxy_, and sprinkled throughout all his writings of a later date than 1906 or so. He protests on more than one occasion against Mr. Shaw's epigram, which seems to him to contain the essence of all that is wrong to-day, "The golden rule is that there is no golden rule." Chesterton insists that there is a golden rule, that it is a very old one, and that it is known to a great many people, most of whom belong to the working cla.s.ses.

In his argument that, on the whole, the ma.s.ses are (or were) right about religion, and that the intellectuals are wrong, Chesterton is undoubtedly at his most bellicose and his sincerest. His is the pugnacity that prefers to pull down another's banner rather than to raise his own. His "defences" in _The Defendant_, and the six hundred odd cases made out by him in the columns of The Daily News are largely and obviously inspired by the wish, metaphorically speaking, to punch somebody's head. The fact that he is not a mere bully appears in the appeal to common decency which Chesterton would be incapable of omitting from an article. Nevertheless he prefers attack to defence. In war, the offensive is infinitely more costly than the defensive. But in controversy this is reversed. The opener of a debate is in a much more difficult position than his opponent. The latter need only criticize the former's case; he is not compelled to disclose his own defences.

Chesterton used to have a grand time hoisting people on their own petards, and letting forth strings of epigrams at the expense of those from whom he differed, and only incidentally revealing his own position.

Then, as he tells us in the preface to _Orthodoxy_, when he had published the saltatory series of indictments ent.i.tled _Heretics_, a number of his critics said, in effect, "Please, Mr. Chesterton, what are we to believe?" Mr. G. S. Street, in particular, begged for enlightenment. G.K.C. joyously accepted the invitation, and wrote _Orthodoxy_, his most brilliant book.

There are few works in the English language the brilliancy of which is so sustained. _Orthodoxy_ is a rapid torrent of epigrammatically expressed arguments. Chesterton's method in writing it is that of the digger wasp. This intelligent creature carries on the survival of the fittest controversy by paralyzing its opponent first, and then proceeding to lay the eggs from which future fitness will proceed in the unresisting but still living body. Chesterton begins by paralyzing his reader, by savagely attacking all the beliefs which the latter, if he be a modern and a sceptic, probably regards as first principles. Tolerance is dismissed, as we have just seen, as a mere excuse for not caring.

Reason, that awful French G.o.ddess, is shown to be another apology.

Nietzsche and various other authors to whom some of us have bent the knee are slaughtered without misery. Then Chesterton proceeds to the argument, the reader being by this time receptive enough to swallow a camel, on the sole condition that G.K.C. has previously slightly treacled the animal.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to a.s.sert that at this point Chesterton pretends to begin his argument. As a matter of strict fact he only describes his adventures in Fairyland, which is all the earth. He tells us of his profound astonishment at the consistent recurrence of apples on apple trees, and at the general jolliness of the earth. He describes, very beautifully, some of the sensations of childhood making the all-embracing discovery that things are what they seem, and the even more joyful feeling of pretending that they are not, or that they will cease to be at any moment. A young kitten will watch a large cushion, which to it is a very considerable portion of the universe, flying at it without indicating any very appreciable surprise. A child, in the same way, would not be surprised if his house suddenly developed wings and flew away. Chesterton cultivated this att.i.tude of always expecting to be surprised by the most natural things in the world, until it became an obsession, and a part of his journalistic equipment. In a sense Chesterton is the everlasting boy, the Undergraduate Who Would Not Grow Up. There must be few normally imaginative town-bred children to whom the pointed upright area-railings do not appear an unsearchable armoury of spears or as walls of protective flames, temporarily frozen black so that people should be able to enter and leave their house. Every child knows that the old Norse story of a sleeping Brunnhilde encircled by flames is true; to him or her, there is a Brunnhilde in every street, and the child knows that there it always has a chance of being the chosen Siegfried. But because this view of life is so much cosier than that of the grown-ups, Chesterton clings to his childhood's neat little universe and weeps pathetically when anybody mentions Herbert Spencer, and makes faces when he hears the word Newton. He insists on a fair dole of surprises. "Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys and sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?"

Now this fairyland business is frankly overdone. Chesterton conceives of G.o.d, having carried the Creation as far as this world, sitting down to look at the new universe in a sort of ecstasy. "And G.o.d saw every thing that he had made, and, behold it was very good." He enjoyed His new toy immensely, and as He sent the earth spinning round the sun, His pleasure increased. So He said "Do it again" every time the sun had completed its course, and laughed prodigiously, and behaved like a happy child. And so He has gone on to this day saying "Do it again" to the sun and the moon and the stars, to the animal creation, and the trees, and every living thing. So Chesterton pictures G.o.d, giving His name to what others, including Christians, call natural law, or the laws of G.o.d, or the laws of gravitation, conservation of energy, and so on, but always laws. For which reason, one is compelled to a.s.sume that in his opinion G.o.d is now [1915] saying to Himself, "There's another b.l.o.o.d.y war, do it again, sun," and gurgling with delight. It is dangerous to wander in fairyland, as Chesterton has himself demonstrated, "one might meet a fairy." It is not safe to try to look G.o.d in the face. A prophet in Israel saw the glory of Jehovah, and though He was but the G.o.d of a small nation, the prophet's face shone, and, so great was the vitality he absorbed from the great Source that he "was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated." That is the reverent Hebrew manner of conveying the glory of G.o.d. But Chesterton, cheerfully playing toss halfpenny among the fairies, sees an idiot child, and calls it G.o.d.

Fortunately for the argument, Chesterton has no more to say about his excursion in Fairyland after his return. He goes on to talk about the subst.i.tutes which people have invented for Christianity. The Inner Light theory has vitriol sprayed upon it. Marcus Aurelius, it is explained, acted according to the Inner Light. "He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats leading the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games in the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land." The present writer does not profess any ability to handle philosophic problems philosophically; it seems to him, however, that if Chesterton had been writing a few years later, he would have attempted to extinguish the latest form of the Inner Light, that "intuition" which has been so much a.s.sociated with M. Bergson's teachings.

The Inner Light is finally polished off as follows:

Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light.

Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the G.o.d within. Any one who knows anybody knows how it would work; anybody who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones should worship the G.o.d within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. . . . Christianity came into the world firstly in order to a.s.sert with violence that a man has not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.

Continuing his spiritual autobiography, Chesterton describes his gradual emergence from the wonted agnosticism of sixteen through the mediumship of agnostic literature. Once again that remark of Bacon's showed itself to be true, "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." A man may read Huxley and Bradlaugh, who knew their minds, and call himself an agnostic. But when it comes to reading their followers, there's another story to tell. What especially struck Chesterton was the wholesale self-contradictoriness of the literature of agnosticism. One man would say that Christianity was so harmful that extermination was the least that could be desired for it, and another would insist that it had reached a harmless and doddering old age. A writer would a.s.sert that Christianity was a religion of wrath and blood, and would point to the Inquisition, and to the religious wars which have at one time or another swept over the civilized world. But by the time the reader's blood was up, he would come across some virile atheist's proclamation of the feeble, mattoid character of the religion in question, as ill.u.s.trated by its quietist saints, the Quakers, the Tolstoyans, and non-resisters in general. When he had cooled down, he would run into a denunciation of the asceticism of Christianity, the monastic system, hair-shirts, and so on. Then he would come across a sweeping condemnation of its sensual luxuriousness, its bejewelled chalices, its pompous rituals, the extravagance of its archbishops, and the like. Christianity "was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured." And then the sudden obvious truth burst upon Chesterton, What if Christianity was the happy mean?

Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad--in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor.

But then the modern man was really exceptional in history. No man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on _entrees_. The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagant _entrees_, not in the bread and wine.

Nevertheless, Christianity was centrifugal rather than centripetal; it was not a mere average, but a centre of gravity; not a compromise, but a conflict. Christ was not half-G.o.d and half-man, like Hercules, but "perfect G.o.d and perfect man." Man was not only the highest, but also the lowest. "The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul."

At this point agreement with Mr. Chesterton becomes difficult.

Christianity, he tells us, comes in with a flaming sword and performs neat acts of bisection. It separates the sinner from the sin, and tells us to love the former and hate the latter. He also tells us that no pagan would have thought of this. Leaving aside the question whether or not Plato was a Christian, it may be pointed out that whereas Chesterton condemns Tolstoyanism whenever he recognizes it, he here proclaims Tolstoy's doctrine. On the whole, however, the mild perverseness of the chapter on _The Paradoxes of Christianity_ leaves its major implications safe. It does not matter greatly whether we prefer to regard Christianity as a centre of gravity, or a point of balance. We need only pause to note Chesterton personifies this dualism. _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ is the arrangement of little bits of iron--the inhabitants of London, in this case--around the two poles of a fantastic magnet, of which one is Adam Wayne, the fanatic, and the other, Auberon Quin, the humorist. In _The Ball and the Cross_ the diagram is repeated. James Turnbull, the atheist, and Evan MacIan, the believer, are the two poles.

We speak in a loose sort of way of opposite poles when we wish to express separation. But, in point of fact, they symbolize connection far more exactly. They are absolutely interdependent. The whole essence of a North and a South Pole is that we, knowing where one is, should be able to say where the other is. n.o.body has ever suggested a universe in which the North Pole wandered about at large. This is the idea which Chesterton seems to have captured and introduced into his definition of Christianity.

Democracy, to Chesterton, is the theory that one man is as good as another; Christianity, he finds, is the virtual sanctification by supernatural authority of democracy. He points out the incompatibility of political democracy, for example, with the determinism to which Mr.

Blatchford's logical atheism has brought him. If man is the creature of his heredity and his environment, as Mr. Blatchford a.s.serts, and if a slum-bred heredity and a slum environment do not make for high intelligence, then obviously it is against the best interests of the State to allow the slum inhabitant to vote. On the other hand, it is entirely to the best interests of the State to entrust its affairs to the aristocracy, whose breeding and environment gives it an enormous amount of intelligence. Christianity, by proclaiming that every man's body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, insists both upon the necessity of abolishing the slums and of honouring the slum-dwellers as sharers with the rest of humanity in a common sonship. This is the case for Socialism, it may be pointed out parenthetically, and Chesterton has let it slip past him. He insists that orthodoxy is the best conceivable guardian of liberty, for the somewhat far-fetched reason that no believer in miracles would have such "a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos" as to cling to the theory that men should not have the liberty to work changes. If a man believed in the freedom of G.o.d, in fact, he would have to believe in the freedom of man.

The obvious answer to which is that he generally doesn't. Christianity made for eternal vigilance, Chesterton maintains, whereas Buddhism kept its eye on the Inner Light--which means, in fact, kept it shut. In proof, or at least in confirmation of this, he points to the statues of Christian saints and of the Buddha. The former keep their eyes open wide, the latter keep their eyes firmly closed. Vigilance, however, does not always make for liberty--the vigilance of the Inquisition, for example. Leaving out of account this and other monstrous exceptions, we might say spiritual liberty, perhaps, but not political liberty, not, at any rate, since the days of Macchiavelli, and the divorce of Church and State.

By insisting specially on the immanence of G.o.d we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference--Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of G.o.d we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, religious indignation--Christendom. Insisting that G.o.d is inside man, man is always inside himself.

By insisting that G.o.d transcends man, man has transcended himself.

In concluding the book, Chesterton joyously refutes a few anti-Christian arguments by means of his extraordinary knack of seeing the large and obvious, and therefore generally overlooked things. He believes in Christianity because he is a rationalist, and the evidence in its favour has convinced him. The arguments with which he deals are these. That men are much like beasts, and probably related to them. Answer: yes, but men are also quite wonderfully unlike them in many important respects. That primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear. Answer: we know nothing about prehistoric man, because he was prehistoric, therefore we cannot say where he got his religion from. But "the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall." And so on: the argument that Christ was a poor sheepish and ineffectual professor of a quiet life is answered by the flaming energy of His earthly mission; the suggestion that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages is countered by the historical fact that it "was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark." It was the path that led from Roman to modern civilization, and we are here because of it. And the book ends with a peroration that might be likened to a torrent, were it not for the fact that torrents are generally narrow and shallow. It is a most remarkable exhibition of energy, a case from which flippancies and irrelevancies have been removed, and where the central conviction advances irresistibly. Elsewhere in the book Chesterton had been inconsequent, darting from point to point, lunging at an opponent one moment, formulating a theory in the next, and producing an effect which, if judged by sample, would be considered bizarre and undirected. The book contains a few perversities, of course.

The author attempts to rebut the idea "that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom," by pointing out that in one or two priest-ridden countries wine and song and dance abound. Yes, but if people are jollier in France and Spain and Italy than in savage Africa, it is due not to the priests so much as to the climate which makes wine cheap and an open-air life possible. No amount of priests would be able to set the inhabitants of the Belgian Congo dancing around a maypole singing the while glad songs handed down by their fathers. No amount of priests would be able to make the festive Eskimo bask in the sun and sing in chorus when there wasn't any sun and it was altogether too cold to open their mouths wide in the open air. In fact the priests are not the cause of the blight where it exists, just as they are not the cause of the jolliness, when there is any. But _Orthodoxy_ is Chesterton's sincerest book. It is perhaps the only one of the whole lot in the course of which he would not be justified in repeating a remark which begins one of the _Tremendous Trifles_, "Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element of truth."

Twice upon a time there was a Samuel Butler who wrote exhilaratingly and died and left the paradoxical contents of his notebooks to be published by posterity. The first (i.e. of Hudibras, not of Erewhon) had many lively things to say on the question of orthodoxy, being the forerunner of G.K.C. And I am greatly tempted to treat Samuel Butler as an ancestor to be described at length. Chesterton might well have said, "It is a dangerous thing to be too inquisitive, and search too narrowly into a true Religion, for 50,000 Bethshemites were destroyed only for looking into the Ark of the Covenant, and ten times as many have been ruined for looking too curiously into that Booke in which that Story is recorded"--in fact in _Magic_ he very nearly did say the same thing. He would have liked (as who would not?) to have been the author of the saying that "Repentant Teares are the waters upon which the Spirit of G.o.d moves," or that "There is no better Argument to prove that the Scriptures were written by Divine Inspiration, than that excellent saying of our Savior, If any man will go to Law with thee for thy cloke, give him thy Coate also." He might well have written dozens of those puns and aphorisms of Butler which an unkind fate has omitted from the things we read, and even from the things we quote. But Butler provides an answer to Chesterton, for he was an intelligent antic.i.p.ator who foresaw exactly what would happen when orthodoxy, which is to say the injunction to shout with the larger crowd, should be proclaimed as the easiest way out of religious difficulties. Before a reader has finally made up his mind on _Orthodoxy_ (and it is highly desirable that he should do so), let him consider two little texts:

"They that profess Religion and believe it consists in frequenting of Sermons, do, as if they should say They have a great desire to serve G.o.d, but would faine be perswaded to it. Why should any man suppose that he pleases G.o.d by patiently hearing an Ignorant fellow render Religion ridiculous?"

"He [a Catholic] prefers his Church merely for the Antiquity of it, and cares not how sound or rotten it be, so it be but old. He takes a liking to it as some do to old Cheese, only for the blue Rottenness of it. If he had lived in the primitive Times he had never been a _Christian_; for the Antiquity of the _Pagan_ and _Jewish_ Religion would have had the same Power over him against the _Christian_, as the old _Roman_ has against the modern Reformation."

Here we leave Samuel Butler. The majority stands the largest chance of being right through the sheer operation of the law of averages. But somehow one does not easily imagine a mob pa.s.sing through the gate that is narrow and the way that is narrow. One prefers to think of men going up in ones and twos, perhaps even in loneliness, and rejoicing at the strange miracle of judgment that all their friends should be a.s.sembled at the journey's end.

But the final criticism of Chesterton's _Orthodoxy_ is that it is not orthodox. He claims that he is "concerned only to discuss . . . the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles'

Creed)" and, "When the word 'orthodoxy' is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed." In other words he counts as orthodox Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Russians, Nonconformists, Lutherans, Calvinists, and all manner of queer fish, possibly Joanna Southcott, Mrs. Annie Besant, and Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. He might even, by stretching a point or two (which is surely permissible by the rules of their game), rope in the New Theologians. Now this may be evidence of extraordinary catholicity, but not of orthodoxy. Chesterton stands by and applauds the h.o.m.oousians scalping the h.o.m.oiousians, but he is apparently willing to leave the Anglican and the Roman Catholic on the same plane of orthodoxy, which is absurd. We cannot all be right, even the Duke in _Magic_ would not be mad enough to a.s.sert that. And the average Christian would absolutely refuse his adherence to a statement of orthodoxy that left the matter of supreme spiritual authority an open question.

In the fifteenth century practically every Englishman would have declared with some emphasis that it lay in the Pope of Rome. In the twentieth century practically every Englishman would declare with equal emphasis that it did not. This change of opinion was accompanied by considerable ill-feeling on both sides, and was, as it were, illuminated by burning martyrs. The men of both parties burned in both an active and a pa.s.sive sense. Those charming Tudor sisters, b.l.o.o.d.y Mary (as the Anglicans call her) and b.l.o.o.d.y Bess (as the Roman Catholics affectionately name her) left a large smudge upon accepted ideas of orthodoxy; charred human flesh was a princ.i.p.al const.i.tuent of it. The mark remains, the differences are far greater, but, to Chesterton, both Anglican and Roman Catholic are "orthodox." Of such is the illimitable orthodoxy of an ethical society, or of a body of Theosophists who "recognize the essential unity of all creeds and religions"--the liars!

Chesterton tells us that Messrs. Shaw, Kipling, Wells, Ibsen and others are heretics, because of their doctrines. But he gives us no idea whether the Pope of Rome, who sells indulgences, is a heretic. And as the Pope is likely to outlive Messrs. Shaw, etc., by perhaps a thousand years, it is possible that Chesterton has been attacking the ephemeral heresies, while leaving the major ones untouched. In effect, Chesterton tells us no more than that we should shout with the largest crowd. But the largest crowd prefers, just now, not to do anything so clamorous.

The most curious feature about the present position of Christianity is the energy with which its opponents combine to keep it going. While Mr.

Robert Blatchford continues to argue that man's will is not free, and Sir Oliver Lodge continues to maintain that it is, the Doctrine of the Resurrection is safe; it is not even attacked. But the net result of all those peculiar modern things called "movements" is a state of immobility like a nicely balanced tug-of-war. Perhaps a Rugby scrum would make a better comparison.

The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belong to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belong to the black-and-white epoch, when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not infrequently in Revolution. And whatever each man believed in, he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because Radicals were wise enough to be conservative. . . . Let beliefs fade fast and frequently if you wish inst.i.tutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy--the plain fruit of them all is that Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard Shaw, and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed, gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It is on these grounds that we must believe that, even as the Church survives, and prevails, in order to get a hearing when the atheist and the New Theologian have finished shouting themselves hoa.r.s.e at each other, so must political creeds be in conformity with the doctrines of the Church. Such is the foundation of democracy, according to Chesterton. Will anybody revise his political views on this basis?

Probably not. Every Christian believes that his political opinions are thoroughly Christian, and so entire is the disrepute into which atheism has fallen as a philosophy of life, that a great many atheists likewise protest the entire Christianity of their politics. We are all democrats to-day, in one sense or another; each of us more loosely than his neighbour. It is strange that by the criterion of almost every living man who springs to the mind as a representative democrat, Chesterton is the most undemocratic of us all. This, however, needs a separate chapter of explanation.