From all this it is but a step to the consideration of dogma and the orthodox Christian creed.  Mr. Chesterton is at war to the knife with vague modernism in all its forms.  The eternal verities which produce great convictions are incomparably the most important things for human nature.  No “inner light” will serve man’s turn, but some outer light, and that only and always.  “Christianity came into the world, firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.”  This again is human nature.  No man can live his life out fully without being mastered by convictions that he cannot challenge, and for whose origin he is not responsible.  The most essentially human thing is the sense that these, the supreme conditions of life, are not of man’s own arranging, but have been and are imposed upon him.

At almost every point this system may be disputed.  Mr. Chesterton, who never shrinks from pressing his theories to their utmost length, scoffs at the modern habit of “saying that such-and-such a creed can be held in one age, but cannot be held in another.  Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth.  You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.  You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four.”  That is precisely what many of us do say.  Our powers of dogmatising vary to some extent with our moods, and to a still greater extent with the reception of new light.  There are many days on which the dogmas of early morning are impossible and even absurd when considered in the light of evening.

But it is not our task to criticise Mr. Chesterton’s faith nor his way of dealing with it.  Were we to do so, most of us would probably strike a balance.  We would find many of his views and statements unconvincing; and yet we would acknowledge that they had the power of forcing the mind to see fresh truth upon which the will must act decisively.  The main point in his orthodoxy is unquestionably a most valuable contribution to the general faith of his time and country.  That point is the adventure which he narrates under the similitude of the voyage that ended in the discovery of England.  He set out to find the empirical truth of human nature and the meaning of human life, as these are to be explored in experience.  When he found them, it was infinitely surprising to him to become aware that the system in which his faith had come at last to rest was just Christianity—­the only system which could offer any adequate and indeed exact account of human nature.  The articles of its creed he recognised as the points of conviction which are absolutely necessary to the understanding of human nature and to the living of human life.