There is, for example, the paradox of the love of the world—­“Somehow one must love the world without being worldly.”  Again, “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”  The martyr differs from the suicide in that he cherishes a disdain of death, while the motive of the suicide is a disdain of life.  Charity, too, is a paradox, for it means “one of two things—­pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.”  Similarly Christian humility has a background of unheard-of arrogance, and Christian liberty is possible only to the 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.”