re these. That men
are much like beasts, and probably related to them. Answer: yes, but men
are also quite wonderfully unlike them in many important respects. That
primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear. Answer: we know nothing
about prehistoric man, because he was prehistoric, therefore we cannot
say where he got his religion from. But "the whole human race has a
tradition of the Fall." And so on: the argument that Christ was a poor
sheepish and ineffectual professor of a quiet life is answered by the
flaming energy of His earthly mission; the suggestion that Christianity
belongs to the Dark Ages is countered by the historical fact that it
"was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark." It was the
path that led from Roman to modern civilization, and we are here because
of it. And the book ends with a peroration that might be likened to a
torrent, were it not for the fact that torrents are generally narrow
and shallow. It is a most remarkable exhibition of energy, a case from
which flippancies and irrelevancies have been removed, and where the
central conviction advances irresistibly. Elsewhere in the book
Chesterton had been inconsequent, darting from point to point, lunging
at an opponent one moment, formulating a theory in the next, and
producing an effect which, if judged by sample, would be considered
bizarre and undirected. The book contains a few perversities, of course.
The author attempts to rebut the idea "that priests have blighted
societies with bitterness and gloom," by pointing out that in one or two
priest-ridden countries wine and song and dance abound. Yes, but if
people are jollier in France and Spain and Italy than in savage Africa,
it is due not to the priests so much as to the climate which makes wine
cheap and an open-air life possible. No amount of priests would be able
to set the inhabitants of the Belgian Congo dancing around a maypole
singing the while glad songs handed down by their fathers. No amount of
priests would be able to make the festive Eskimo bask in the sun and
sing in chorus when there wasn't any sun and it was altogether too cold
to open their mouths wide in the open air. In fact the priests are not
the cause of the blight where it exists, just as they are not the cause
of the jolliness, when there is any. But _Orthodoxy_ is Chesterton's
sincerest book. It is perhaps the only one of the whole lot in the
course of which he would not be justified in repeating a remar