The Christian Apologist
After three years (1900-1903) during which Chesterton perceived himself more and more as being on the side of the Christian faith against the modern world, he suddenly saw his opportunity to defend it against an opponent who was worthy of his mettle. Two months before the publication of Robert Browning, Chesterton came across an article in The Clarion by the paper’s anti-Christian founder and editor, Robert Blatchford in which he challenged Christians to respond to his own attacks; and Chesterton duly responded with an article in The Daily News (‘The Return of the Angels’) which inaugurated a pitched battle in print which was to continue, intermittently, until the end of the following year.
By the time the controversy had run its course, Chesterton had clearly established his role, in his own mind at least, as a committed apologist for the Christian religion. Not only that: we can say that he had come to understand everything else in the context of his faith. In December, 1903, he wrote in The Daily News that
You cannot evade the issue of God; whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him…. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true. Zulus, gardening, butcher’s shops, lunatic asylums, housemaids and the French Revolution — all these things not only may have something to do with the Christian God, but must have something to do with Him if He really lives and reigns.
With Orthodoxy (1908), Chesterton saw himself as having reached, as he had with his campaign against Blatchford, ‘a landmark in my life’ – a milestone at which he needed once more to at take stock of his life and beliefs: the book was, he declared, ‘a sort of slovenly autobiography’. It was his purpose, Chesterton declared, ‘to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it’. This autobiographical mode is no mere literary or apologetic device but the expression of a deep-rooted instinct; and in this appeal to his own experience and perceptions, Orthodoxy is typical of all his writings, and particularly of his journalism, which depends heavily on Chesterton’s self-projection as a protagonist, a dramatis persona (partly artificially constructed, mostly entirely genuine) who goes into battle in the various ideological, political and theological skirmishes which he enacts for his audience.
"The Ethics of Elfland"
from Orthodoxy (1908), Chapter Four
"The Paradoxes of Christianity"
from Orthodoxy (1908), Chapter Six
"The Summary of this Book"
from The Everlasting Man (1925), Conclusion