a stick or a stone or a pole or a poker’ (here I began for the first time to detect a sarcastic intonation) ’or a shovel or a——­’ Here he hesitated for a word, and I, although I knew nothing about the matter, helped him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical vein.  ‘Or a button-hook,’ I said, ’or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram or a piston-rod——­’ He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, ’Or a curtain-rod or a candlestick or a——­’ ‘Cow-catcher,’ I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic duet for some time.  Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told me.  He explained the thing eloquently and at length.  ‘The funny part of it is,’ he said, ’that the thing isn’t new at all.  It’s been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before.’” Mr. Chesterton rejoins in a long and eloquent and most amusing sermon, the following extracts from which are not without far-reaching significance.

“’What you say reminds me in some dark and dreamy fashion of something else.  I recall it especially when you tell me, with such evident experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not really new.  My friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of making everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it shifts on to another....  It would be nice if we could be shaved without troubling anybody.  It would be nicer still if we could go unshaved without annoying anybody—­

     “’But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand,
     Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.

Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it under strange limitations, and with painful conditions of pleasure....  But every now and then men jump up with the new something or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice, that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there is no real difference between being shaved and not being shaved.  The difference, they say, is only a difference of degree; everything is evolutionary and relative.  Shavedness is immanent in man....  I have been profoundly interested in what you have told me about the New Shaving.  Have you ever heard of a thing called the New Theology?’ He smiled and said that he had not.”

In contrast with all this, it is Mr. Chesterton’s conviction that the facts must be unflinchingly and in their entirety accepted.  With characteristic courage he goes straight to the root of the matter and begins with the fact of sin.  “If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions.  He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.  The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.”  It is as if he said, Here you have direct and unmistakable experience.  A man knows his sin as he knows himself.  He may explain it in either one way or another way.  He may interpret the universe accordingly in terms either of heaven or of hell.  But the one unreasonable and impossible thing to do is to deny the experience itself.