Peter Milward, in an essay in The Chesterton Review, has speculated on the problem that an unsuspecting cataloguer at some famous library might have in first confronting the works of Chesterton. How would they be identified? Works in literature? in theology? in philosophy? in poetry? in detective stories? in humor? in science? in literary criticism? in politics? in English literature? in apologetics? in economics? in history? in biography? in travel?² Yet, we know that Chesterton, when it came to identifying what he thought himself to be, called himself simply a “journalist.” Needless to say, we would be more than a...

In 1927, Chesterton’s book The Catholic Church and Conversion was published. Belloc did the “Foreword” and Chesterton himself wrote his own “Introduction,” which he called, not without some amusement, “A New Religion.” Both short essays remain of considerable and refreshing interest. Belloc was the “born- Catholic” of the two, so, as he remarks, “it is with diffidence that anyone born into the Faith can approach the tremendous subject of Conversion.” The convert always has the aura of choice; the born-Catholic of tradition, of not having had to change anything, only fulfill the promise already his.

As I was born the...

Chesterton is often called amusing, mostly because he is. In a column on March 21, 1914, he mentioned that he was also called an “Apostle of Unreason.” Needless to say, Chesterton never thought of himself as merely a humorist, a sort of Art Buchwald of his times. But he did enjoy a good laugh even when occasioned by a philosopher. Yet he was astonished to find himself called an Apostle of Unreason. Chesterton chronicled practically the whole of modernity from Bergson to James and Nietzsche. Every one of these philosophers advocated one or another form of unreason. Since Chesterton adamantly...

Several years ago, a friend of mine who was living in England at the time found an 1888 edition of Thomas Babbington (Lord) Macaulay’s Essays, a volume reprinted from The Edinburgh Review. This was a handsome old tome, published by Longmans, and printed by Spottiswoode on New-Street Square in London. This book is a kind of gift that can just sit there on your shelves for no reason except that it is a nice book. You do not have to read it right away, but every once in a while you will pick it up. I have, because of my...

In our childhood home in Iowa, we had two rather special books, as I recall it now, books my father often used to talk about with some earnestness, books I remember reading with distinct awe as quite a young boy. They were by an English priest by the name of Owen Francis Dudley. One book was called The Shadow on the Earth and the other Will Men Be Like Gods? Just what their plots were, I cannot now recall. But they had to do with themes that remain quite modern, the questions (a) of whether men by themselves can continue...

Several years ago, I was given the collection of Chesterton poems and essays called The Spirit of Christmas.¹ In this little book, there is found an essay from The New Witness (December 8, 1922) entitled “The Heart of Bethlehem.” In this essay, Chesterton brought up the curious fact that the Holy Family at the Birth of Christ has been painted as if they, its members, were to be found in almost any climate or architecture, in any economic, geographical, racial, or cultural setting.

Yet, we know that the whole romance of Christmas is that it happened but once, like all...

In the October Midwest Chesterton News, Christopher Derrick wrote a brief reply to Frances Farrell’s earlier essay in which she questioned Derrick’s use of the term “sado-masochism,” which he had applied to Chesterton.¹

I too was surprised and quite dubious about the wisdom and truth of this allegation when I had first seen it in Derrick. What concerns me here is merely the sort of tack that Derrick used to establish his view, a line that I consider very much against the spirit of common sense philosophy that Chesterton stood for. Of course, we might say that Derrick is not...

In the collection of stories and fables by Chesterton entitled Daylight and Nightmare, there appears a four-page story called “A Picture of Tuesday.” This story originally was published in something called The Quarto, in 1896, that is, when Chesterton was twenty-two years old. At that time, Chesterton was working for Fisher Unwin Publishers, reading hundreds of novels.

This particular story puzzled me on first reading it because I was not quite sure what it was about. I read it again and began to sketch out the characters and what was said about each of them. The story is ostensibly about...

An original mind, I think, is one that sees truth as it exists in things. To be sure, we must affirm what we see to make it ours and therefore fulfill in some sense the higher purpose of things that are not ourselves. But books and philosophies and discourses ought not to stand between ourselves and what is. We know too that most often what we come to understand depends on our ability to let ourselves see what is there, not what we want to be there, or what we intend to do with what is there. The disarming thing...

Every so often, I receive a note from W. Shepherdson Abell in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Mr. Abell once made the mistake of asking me to recommend a number of books to read on the centrality of faith and truth. He may even have been the immediate catalyst that finally resulted in the lists of books in my Another Sort of Learning.¹

In the mail the other day, Mr. Abell kindly sent me a copy of a book his father, William S. Abell, had recently published with Christian Classics (1991). Laughter and the Love of Friends, a book whose title sounds...

I do not recall now when I first read Chesterton’s The Defendant. It was one of his earliest books, from 1901, basically a revised series of essays from a journal called The Speaker. Until Christmas, I did not have a copy of this book, but John Peterson somehow dug up a copy—the 1914 Dent fourth edition. As ever, such thoughtful gifts are just that—thoughtful, things that make us think.

This particular book, I noticed, had three previous owner-markings on it. The first is a kind of sticker on the inside front cover on which there is an owl...

John Peterson called my attention to an essay in a book I had never heard of, but which fortunately I found in the Georgetown Library, namely, G.K.C. as M.C..This is a wonderful book published by Methuen in London in 1929, Being a Collection of Thirty-Seven Introductions, as its subtitle reads. The book was collected and edited by J. P. de Fonseka, a name I do not know. The book’s frontispiece consists of a drawing by J. H. Dowd from May 1929, entitled “Bibliophilus Maximus,” a drawing that shows a very portly Chesterton with slouchy hat, cape, moustache, umbrella, baggy pants...

Let me continue the thought in the previous chapter on Dr. Johnson, by talking about the first essay in Chesterton’s G.K.C. as M.C., his essay “Boswell.” Actually, this essay is not so much on Boswell as on Boswell’s book on Samuel Johnson. I say this because I have read Boswell’s journeys to the Continent and his London Journal, where we see a younger Boswell, a less edifying Boswell, yet still the Boswell who eventually encounters Johnson. Chesterton is quite aware that Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is the record not of one great man but “it is the record of...

The very first words in Chesterton’s essay, “Why I Am a Catholic,” are these: “The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.”¹ That this claim to be true is the real problem with Catholicism, I have no doubt. To the modern mind, any claim to truth, especially divine, revealed truth, is looked upon as arrogant, a denial of equality. The human intellect has gotten itself into such a bind that it can no longer recognize exactly what it is for, that is, an...

Chesterton once tried to steal some of the thunder belonging to us clerics. In Robert Knille’s collection, As I Was Saying, I found an essay entitled “If I Had Only One Sermon To Preach,” an essay originally collected in The Common Man. It is not without revealing a very deep understanding of the modern mind that Chesterton proposed to give his sermon this title. “If I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against pride,” he affirmed. At the end of his essay, he playfully doubted whether he would ever be invited to give another sermon,...

Recently, Ignatius Press published a new paperback edition of Chesterton’s 1910 book, What’s Wrong with the World. Over the years, I have owned not the original but still several earlier editions of this wonderful book but somehow I have misplaced, lost, or given them away. I think my sister in Medford, Oregon, has one that is now hers by right of long possession. It is one of those seminal books that every man who seeks the truth should own and reread on a regular basis. It is almost the only book that explains what is ultimately at stake when we...

Thinking of November, I casually looked up what Chesterton was writing about in this month. On November 24, 1906, in the Illustrated London News, for example, Chesterton wrote a column entitled “On Wicked Actions.” By any philosophic standards, this title looked promising.¹

Chesterton began by pointing out the difference between international aggression and dramatic raids. He gave no support to the former but he did have a certain “dark and wild sympathy” with aggression when it was manifestly absurd. Sudden raids are of no use as practical politics. They are rather like practical jokes. The French were given to useless...

Chesterton’s Christmas essay for 1926 was entitled, in the Collected Works edition (Vol. XXXIV), “The Old Christmas Carols,” while the essay for 1927 was called “The Rituals of Christmas.” In one sense, of course, carols and rituals make Christmas. The essence of Christmas is the Nativity, the Birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, into this world. The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.

Carols and rituals arise from our human attempts to say to ourselves what this Birth means. That is, we acknowledge that whatever else this glory of God on High is, we did not...

The May 1993 issue of The Chesterton Review contains an essay of Professor John Wren-Lewis at the University of Sydney entitled, “Adam, Eve, and Agatha Christie.” Professor Wren-Lewis as a young man in London happened to be present when Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap was first performed in London some forty years ago. As that famous play is still going strong, Wren-Lewis began to wonder just why such a thing as a perfect detective story might prove so popular and enduring.

Wren-Lewis’s reflections took him back to the account of the Fall, to modern man’s need to account for evil. The...

The first pages of Heretics (1905) are entitled “Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy.” These remarks were written about five years after the turn of the twentieth century, just as these present remarks are written some five years before its ending. Were it not apt to make me sound out-of-date, I am inclined to think nothing much has changed. That is to say, the permanent things remain permanent and we are among the permanent things, even in our death.

I have always been struck by these particular introductory remarks. They say in their own way what John Paul II...

A friend in Berkeley Springs had mentioned a new edition of Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse. Though I naturally coveted this book, I never made any effort to buy, borrow, or steal it. Such are the designs of gods and men, however, that for Christmas, John Peterson, as is his kindly wont, sent me a present. I received it before Christmas. But as I am loathe to open presents before Christmas, I waited till after my California visit with the family to unwrap it. Yes, to my delight, it was this very book—edited by Sister Bernadette Sheridan and...

At the beginning of The Well and the Shallows (1935), Chesterton writes six essays on his conversion after his conversion. These essays were written in response to the question of whether he ever regretted his conversion. Chesterton wrote in the days in which he did not have to, for ecumenical reasons, apologize to those from whom he was converted, lest it embarrass them or the Church to which he was converted. Chesterton wrote in the days, in other words, in which it was still possible to acknowledge that there were objective reasons to join the Catholic Church and to explain...

Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, argued that in fact the Germans won World War II. He meant by this provocative observation that the ideas that have come to undermine our morals and institutions were of German philosophical origin, dating back to Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and especially to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Max Weber. Bloom recognizes also a French component in this conquest, one that must include Rousseau and the more recent deconstructionists.

Aristotle remarks in a famous phrase in The Politics that a small error in the beginning can lead to an enormous error in the...

The last chapter of an obscure book I published in England was entitled “Of God’s Jokes, Toys, and Christmas Trees.”¹ I was reminded of this chapter when I came across Chesterton’s 1921 Christmas column in the Illustrated London News.² What had occasioned my earlier reflections on Christmas and toys was an essay in the Wall Street Journal about the dubiousness of the idea that giving little boys toy guns for Christmas was somehow dangerous or immoral. I was delighted to see that Chesterton’s 1921 column was entitled “On Dangerous Toys.”

Already here, in 1921, we find Chesterton concerned by the...

A memorable essay in The Well and the Shallows (1935) is entitled “Babies and Distributism.”¹ It may well be the most defiantly counter-cultural essay of our times, to be matched only by Flannery O’Connor’s remark that the Church’s pronouncement on birth control is the most spiritual doctrine of the Church. Neither Chesterton nor Flannery O’Connor had children of their own. Both wrote in disdain of the intellectuals, secular and ecclesiastical, of their era who advocated this practice. Both wrote knowing that their position would be rejected. Both understood that the Church’s position had something profoundly right about it, something at...

The other day I received from New York a copy of the 1986 British Penguin edition of The Man Who Was Thursday. A young friend spotted it in a book store and figured I would like it. How do you give thanks for such unexpected gifts?

What interests me here is the first chapter of The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). The book began with a poem dedicated to Edmund Clerihew Bentley, Chesterton’s lifetime friend. Chesterton explained that out of all the arguments and mysteries of their youth and in spite of the fantastically wrong theories of our intellectuals—“Science...

John Peterson, in generous exchange for my old paperbound Chesterton anthology of Father Brown stories printed during World War II (a volume he had never seen), kindly sent me The Father Brown Omnibus: Every Father Brown Story Ever Written.This is the Dodd, Mead edition of 1951, listing copyrights going back to 1910. I have not in fact read many Father Brown stories. I tell myself that I do not like detective stories, though I like them well enough when I get into them.

What first struck my eye in the index was the story entitled “The Invisible Man.” I vaguely...

Readers have no doubt noticed that I have referred to Original Sin quite a bit of late. It is a fascinating topic, to be sure, the one subject about which Chesterton maintained we need no real proof. We just have to go out in the streets and open our eyes. Just how to describe or define Original Sin is always somewhat mystifying. I did come across a brief sentence, however, in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, that comes pretty close.

The Matchmaker is of course Hello, Dolly. In it, Mr. Horace Vandergelder, the rich merchant from Yonkers, New York, has been...

We cannot help today but be conscious of the degree to which both law and ideological pressure impose on language, requiring us to say certain things in certain ways or forbidding us from saying them in other customary or normal ways. We have to utter the boring “happy holidays” because “Merry Christmas” hints that Christ is important. We have to affirm that active homosexuals live noble lifestyles. We have to pretend that we are all morally equal, no matter what we do, a position that puts vice and virtue on the same level and allows no moral discourse about whether...

When I do a class on St. Thomas, I like the class to read with me during the semester Chesterton’s book St. Thomas Aquinas. One rainy morning near the end of March, about eleven-thirty in the morning, by chance I read aloud to the class a short passage from the August 1995 Chesterton Review, a passage taken from an essay Chesterton wrote in 1911, “School Magazines,” about his early writing at St. Paul’s School. I guess I wanted to make the point to the class that almost any page of Chesterton can lead us to the most profound of topics....

A gentleman in Ireland sent me a copy of Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture, by the Australian philosopher John Carroll.¹ The thesis of this provocative book is simply that western humanism is dead, that its premises of complete human autonomy have proved to be impossible to maintain and dangerous to mankind. The major sign of this death is no doubt the contradiction that exists between our stated ideals and our practices. We cannot, say, abort millions of human beings a year and still maintain that all men are created equal with a right to life. Eventually, we come to...

The Chesterton Review (May 1992) reprinted a Chesterton essay entitled “The Roots of the World.” The essay was originally published in The Daily News in London on August 17, 1907. This would be about the time Chesterton was writing Orthodoxy. The essay begins with a kind of narrative parable. Father Boyd in his little introduction remarked that this was a very famous essay and that Chesterton used such parables “as a way of teaching moral truths.” I suspect that he used it also as a way to teach the metaphysical truths upon which moral truths are based.

Essentially, Chesterton argued...

Frank Petta, on reading of my brother-in-law’s troubles in finding Belloc’s little book on Chesterton, was kind enough to send me a copy of the obituary—it is entitled simply “Gilbert Keith Chesterton”—that Belloc published in The Saturday Review of Literature for July 4, 1936. Belloc had written evidently a number of things on Chesterton just after he died, but I had not known of this particular essay. On receiving it, I read it but put it aside. I chanced to come across it the other day, looking for something else. I re-read it. And I read it a...

Volume III of the Collected Works (1990) includes a book known as The Well and the Shallows (1935). The book ends with two short essays, one of which was a Letter Chesterton wrote to The Catholic Herald entitled “Why Protestants Prohibit.” Chesterton had evidently been asked to give an address on the BBC in the context of a series on “Freedom.” He was asked to speak on freedom as it related to Catholicism. (I do not know if this address still exists on tape somewhere).

Evidently Chesterton’s talk produced a myriad of not always complimentary responses. I bring these essays...

In April 1932, during the height of the Depression, Chesterton published an essay entitled “If Christ Should Come” in, of all journals, Good Housekeeping (reprinted in The Chesterton Review, February 1984). Chesterton, of course, loved houses and good housekeeping, as his What’s Wrong with the World shows.

But this particular essay evidently was supposed to answer the question “How would Christ solve modern problems if he were on earth today?” Notice that the question presupposes that Christ is not on the earth today and, more soberly, that modern problems are somehow intrinsically different from ancient ones. Christ’s initial solutions, it...

Several years ago, at a book sale somewhere here in Washington, I bought for a nominal price, to wit, fifty cents, the Doubleday Dolphin Edition (no date) of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table. This famous collection of chatter, humor, and reflection was written between 1831 and 1832 by the famous American physician and author. I have never really gotten into this book, but I have looked at it and read some of it a number of times.

John Peterson had, in the meantime, called my attention to the Methuen collection G.K.C. as M.C.: Being a Collection...

In the summer of 1926 (July 3 and 10), Chesterton wrote two essays in the Illustrated London News on literature and novels.¹ He began with some advice that I recall my old professor Rudolf Allers had also given some years ago, namely, “read even bad novels.” Allers’s point was that you will likely find in lousy novels some rather accurate insight into how people are thinking or acting that you will not find in good literature or in your own experience. It is not easy to imagine all of the silly and wrong things that we might perpetrate on one...

Quite by chance, I happened to pull out of my files the February 1985, issue of The Chesterton Review on the day after I had happened to see an amusing headline in USA Today (February 5, 1993). The headline read: EQUALITY OF SEXES? GIVE IT 1,000 YEARS. As it turned out, this headline was based on a report of the International Labor Organization, on a forty-one-nation survey about the “progress” of women.

Why the authors did not survey all one hundred and seventy nations in the world on this perplexing topic, I do not know. But given the lengthy time...

Somewhere along the line, I acquired Chesterton’s little book on the English painter George Frederick Watts. This book was originally published in 1904. I have a 1906 Duckworth edition, printed in Edinburgh, a gift from John Peterson. One Saturday in March, I decided to read this book, only to find by the markings in the book that I had already read it. I vaguely recall thinking that this book did not contain many good Chestertonian insights, but on rereading it, I found it, not entirely to my surprise, full of very interesting and indeed wonderful things. Let me recount some...

We have heard the complaint, no doubt, that religion, particularly the Christian religion, is so negative. It seems always to be telling us what we cannot do, not what we can do. We want a “positive” religion; we do not want to worry about don’ts. Just give us the dos. Having propounded this well-known thesis, we proudly content ourselves with our liberality, our progressivism in things to be done.

Such is a very common complaint, and yet, when examined, a very superficial one. When we sort it out, when we think of why the Ten Commandments “forbid,” at least those...

We have a public radio station here in Washington that plays what is rightly called “good music,” that is, classical music. The only flaw in this station is that it also broadcasts National Public Radio “News.” When you forget to turn this news off as quickly as you hear it come on, it forces you to go about the rest of the day annoyed at the unrelenting propaganda that passes for information on this station.

In any case, there is a program on this station called “Desert Island Discs,” a program that consists in getting some congressman or other public...

Chapter twenty-nine of Chesterton’s The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic is entitled “What We Think About.” It is a remarkable chapter because it states most clearly the reason Chesterton is not a modernist and what effect, by contrast, the Catholic dogmas have on our ability to think at all. Briefly, they free us to think because they do not exclude the most difficult things about which we might think. Not to be a modernist means that the human mind is open to ideas and realities that are not limited by a narrow notion of what modern man “can” believe,...

The columns from which these chapters were drawn began in 1989. As far as I can now tell, after we have read and reflected on the whole vast corpus of Chesterton, we will find as much there when we read him again as we found when we began. As Chesterton intimated in his reflections on St. Thomas, there is no limit to what is. And yet there is something definite that Chesterton adds to what is, namely, a word, an illumination about what it is we see, when we in fact do see. Reality is not complete until we speak...

Chesterton (1874–1936), the great English essayist, journalist, and philosopher, was a man of singular good will, engaging charm, and broad interests. From all eyewitness reports about him, he never really had any enemies. He does not seem to have loved those who hated him, for the singular reason that no one hated him. Even those who most disagreed with him on a given issue still had great affection for him and enjoyed his company. To be bested by Chesterton in an argument was a sort of badge of honor—that someone of Chesterton’s stature would take another’s arguments seriously...