The present lecture is mainly concerned with his central position, as that is expounded in Heretics and Orthodoxy.  Our task is not to criticise, nor even to any considerable extent to characterise his views, but to state them as accurately as we can.  It is a remarkable phenomenon of our time that all our literary men are bent on giving us such elaborate and solemnising confessions of their faith.  It is an age notorious for its aversion to dogma, and yet here we have Mr. Huxley, Mr. Le Gallienne, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells (to mention only a few of many), who in this creedless age proclaim in the market-place, each his own private and brand-new creed.

Yet Mr. Chesterton has perhaps a special right to such a proclamation.  He believes in creeds vehemently.  And, besides, the spiritual biography of a man whose mental development has been so independent and so interesting as his, must be well worth knowing.  Amid the many weird theologies of our time we have met with nothing so startling, so arresting, and so suggestive since Mr. Mallock published his New Republic and his Contemporary Superstitions.  There is something common to the two points of view.  To some, they come as emancipating and most welcome reinforcements, relieving the beleaguered citadel of faith.  But others, who differ widely from them both, may yet find in them so much to stimulate thought and to rehabilitate strongholds held precariously, as to awaken both appreciation and gratitude.

Mr. Chesterton’s political opinions do not concern us here.  It is a curious fact, of which innumerable illustrations may be found in past and present writers, that political radicalism so often goes along with conservative theology, and vice versa.  Mr. Chesterton is no exception to the rule.  His orthodoxy in matters of faith we shall find to be altogether above suspicion.  His radicalism in politics is never long silent.  He openly proclaims himself at war with Carlyle’s favourite dogma, “The tools to him who can use them.”  “The worst form of slavery,” he tells us, “is that which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable.  For that means that men choose a representative, not because he represents them but because he does not.”  And if it be answered that the worst form of cruelty to a nation or to an individual is that abuse of the principle of equality which is for ever putting incompetent people into false positions, he has his reply ready:  “The one specially and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea of Carlyle—­the idea that the man should rule who feels that he can rule.  Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen.”

But this, and much else of its kind, although he works it into his general scheme of thinking, is not in any sense an essential part of that scheme.  Our subject is his place in the conflict between the paganism and the idealism of the times, and it is a sufficiently large one.  But before we come to that, we must consider another matter, which we shall find to be intimately connected with it.