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Notes most abject bondsmen in the world.
This long consideration of Mr. Chesterton’s use of paradox is more relevant to our present subject
than it may seem. For, curiously enough, the habit of paradox has been his way of entrance into
faith. At the age of sixteen he was a complete agnostic, and it was the reading of Huxley and
Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh which brought him back to orthodox theology. For, as he read, he
found that Christianity was attacked on all sides, and for all manner of contradictory reasons; and
this discovery led him to the conviction that Christianity must be a very extraordinary thing,
abounding in paradox. But he had already discovered the abundant element of paradox in life;
and when he analysed the two sets of paradoxes he found them to be precisely the same. So he
became a Christian.
It may seem a curious way to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who are accustomed to regard
the strait gate as of Gothic architecture may be shocked to find a man professing to have entered
through this Alhambra-like portal. But it is a lesson we all have to learn sooner or later, that there
are at least eleven gates besides our own, and that every man has to enter by that which he finds
available. Paradox is the only gate by which Mr. Chesterton could get into any place, and the
Kingdom of Heaven is no exception to the rule.
His account of this entrance is characteristic. It is given in the first chapter of his Orthodoxy. There
was an English yachtsman who set out upon a voyage, miscalculated his course, and discovered
what he thought to be a new island in the South Seas. It transpired afterwards that he had run up
his flag on the pavilion of Brighton, and that he had discovered England. That yachtsman is Mr.
Chesterton himself. Sailing the great sea of moral and spiritual speculation, he discovered a land
of facts and convictions to which his own experience had guided him. On that strange land he ran
up his flag, only to make the further and more astonishing discovery that it was the Christian faith
at which he had arrived. Nietzsche had preached to him, as to Mr. Bernard Shaw, his great
precept, “Follow your own will.” But when Mr. Chesterton obeyed he arrived, not at Superman,
but at the ordinary old-fashioned morality. That, he found, is what we like best in our deepest
hearts, and desire most. So he too “discovered England.”
He begins, like Margaret Fuller, with the fundamental principle of accepting the universe. The
thing we know best and most directly is human nature in all its breadth. It is indeed the one thing
immediately known and knowable. Like R.L. Stevenson, he perceives how tragically and comically
astonishing a phenomenon is man. “What a monstrous spectre is this man,” says Stevenson, “the
disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,
feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted
with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at
nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes!” In like manner Mr.
Chesterton discovers man—that appalling mass of paradox and contradiction—and it is the supreme
discovery in any spiritual search.
Having discovered the fundamental fact of human nature, he at once gives in his allegiance to it.
“Our attitude towards life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in
terms of criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like
patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which
we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the
turret, and the more miserable it is, the less we should leave it.”
There is a splendid courage and heartiness in his complete acceptance of life and the universe. In
a time when clever people are so busy criticising life that they are in danger of forgetting that they
have to live it, so busy selecting such parts of it as suit their taste that they ignore the fact that the
other parts are there, he ignores nothing and wisely accepts instead of criticising. Mr. Bernard
Shaw, as we have seen, will consent to tolerate the universe minus the three loyalties to the family,
the nation, and God. Mr. Chesterton has no respect whatever for any such mutilated scheme of
human life. His view of the institution of the family is full of wholesome common sense. He

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