Rottenness of it. If he had lived in the primitive
Times he had never been a _Christian_; for the
Antiquity of the _Pagan_ and _Jewish_ Religion
would have had the same Power over him against the
_Christian_, as the old _Roman_ has against the
modern Reformation."

Here we leave Samuel Butler. The majority stands the largest chance of
being right through the sheer operation of the law of averages. But
somehow one does not easily imagine a mob passing through the gate that
is narrow and the way that is narrow. One prefers to think of men going
up in ones and twos, perhaps even in loneliness, and rejoicing at the
strange miracle of judgment that all their friends should be assembled
at the journey's end.

But the final criticism of Chesterton's _Orthodoxy_ is that it is not
orthodox. He claims that he is "concerned only to discuss . . . the
central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles'
Creed)" and, "When the word 'orthodoxy' is used here it means the
Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian
until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those
who held such a creed." In other words he counts as orthodox Anglicans,
Roman Catholics, Orthodox Russians, Nonconformists, Lutherans,
Calvinists, and all manner of queer fish, possibly Joanna Southcott,
Mrs. Annie Besant, and Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. He might even, by
stretching a point or two (which is surely permissible by the rules of
their game), rope in the New Theologians. Now this may be evidence of
extraordinary catholicity, but not of orthodoxy. Chesterton stands by
and applauds the Homoousians scalping the Homoiousians, but he is
apparently willing to leave the Anglican and the Roman Catholic on the
same plane of orthodoxy, which is absurd. We cannot all be right, even
the Duke in _Magic_ would not be mad enough to assert that. And the
average Christian would absolutely refuse his adherence to a statement
of orthodoxy that left the matter of supreme spiritual authority an open
question.

In the fifteenth century practically every Englishman would have
declared with some emphasis that it lay in the Pope of Rome. In the
twentieth century practically every Englishman would declare with equal
emphasis that it did not. This change of opinion was accompanied by
considerable ill-feeling on both sides, and was, as it were, illuminated
by burning martyrs. Th