Mr. Chesterton applies his attack upon rationality to many subjects, with singular ingenuity.  In the question of marriage and divorce, for instance, the modern school which would break loose from the ancient bonds can present their case with an apparently unassailable show of rationality.  But his reply to them and to all other rationalists is that life is not rational and consistent but paradoxical and contradictory.  To make life rational you have to leave out so many elements as to make it shrink from a big world to a little one, which may be complete, but can never be much of a world.  Its conception of God may be a complete conception, but its God is not much of a God.  But the world of human nature is a vast world, and the God of Christianity is an Infinite God.  The huge mysteries of life and death, of love and sacrifice, of the wine of Cana and the Cross of Calvary—­these outwit all logic and pass all understanding.  So for sane men there comes in a higher authority.  You may call it common sense, or mysticism, or faith, as you please.  It is the extra element by virtue of which all sane thinking and all religious life are rendered possible.  It is the secret spring of vitality alike in human nature and in Christian faith.

At this point it may be permissible to question Mr. Chesterton’s use of words in one important point.  He appears to fall into the old error of confounding reason with reasoning.  Reason is one thing and argument another.  It may be impossible to express either human nature or religious faith in a series of syllogistic arguments, and yet both may be reasonable in a higher sense.  Reason includes those extra elements to which Mr. Chesterton trusts.  It is the synthesis of our whole powers of finding truth.  Many things which cannot be proved by reasoning may yet be given in reason—­involved in any reasonable view of things as a whole.  Thus faith includes reason—­it is reason on a larger scale—­and it is the only reasonable course for a man to take in a world of mysterious experience.  If the matter were stated in that way, Mr. Chesterton would probably assent to it.  Put crudely, the fashion of pitting faith against reason and discarding reason in favour of faith, is simply sawing off the branch on which you are sitting.  The result is that you must fall to the ground at the feet of the sceptic, who asks, “How can you believe that which you have confessed there is no reason to believe?” We have abundant reason for our belief, and that reason includes those higher intuitions, that practical common sense, and that view of things as a whole, which the argument of the mere logician necessarily ignores.