What is Chesterton's tone in the biography, The Dumb Ox?

The Dumb Ox is clearly written by a very devout and unashamed Roman Catholic and, as a result, much of the book is written with the promotion of the Catholic faith in mind. This book is certainly not an apologetic work, in the sense of actively trying to convert the reader; however, it is a book that is written explicitly for non-Catholic arguments and the book clearly goes to great lengths to both show the beneficial effect of the Catholic faith on the world as well as the destructive effect of non-Catholic religions. Thus, for example, Manicheanism, which is a philosophy that comes from the East, is presented as a pessimistic belief system that is ultimately opposed to life itself. Protestantism, too, is seen as a Christianized form of Manicheanism and represents, according to Chesterton, an almost unrestrained pessimism about the world.

However, Chesterton does not at all assume that the reader agrees with him about the Catholic faith, and he writes in such a way that his assumptions are made to seem obvious. He makes a heavy use of rhetoric, especially the use of paradoxical sentence constructions, in order to both entertain the reader and convince him of various points that might be controversial.

Nonetheless, the tone of the book is primarily objective. It is an attempt to give a real overview of the life of a saint that Chesterton greatly admired and also to treat with some level of detail the philosophical system of the book's subject. Chesterton certainly expresses his own opinions throughout the book, and the introductory note makes that explicit, but these comments are, for the most part, distinct from the general thrust of the book.