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This book is meant to be a companion to "Heretics," and toput the positive side in addition to the negative. Many criticscomplained of the book called "Heretics" because it merely criticisedcurrent philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidablyaffirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. The writer hasbeen driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which besetNewman in writing his Apologia; he has been forced to be egotisticalonly in order to be sincere. While everything else may be differentthe motive in both cases is the same. It is the purpose of the writerto attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith canbe believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it.The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddleand its answer. It deals first with all the writer's own solitaryand sincere speculations and then with all the startling style inwhich they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology.The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But ifit is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.
Gilbert K. Chesterton.
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
THE only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answerto 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 intellectI 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 affirmhis cosmic theory, but that I had carefully avoided supporting myprecepts 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 persononly 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 inits pages I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a setof mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to statethe philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call itmy 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 Englishyachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered Englandunder 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 towrite this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposesof philosophical illustration. There will probably be a generalimpression that the man who landed (armed