tebook and _The Coloured Lands_, but they all grew to
maturity in the atmosphere of constant controversy. In a controversy
with the Rev. R. J. Campbell we see, for instance, his convictions
about the reality of sin shaping under our eyes. Discussing Modernism
in the _Nation_, he analyses the difference between the true
development of an idea and the mere changing from one idea to
another. Modernism claiming to be a development was actually an
abandonment of the Christian idea.

For the Catholic, this is among the most interesting of his
controversies. In the course of it he refers to "the earlier works of
Newman and the literature of the Oxford Movement" to support his view
of the Anglican position. I have already said that Chesterton read
far more than was usually supposed, because he read so quickly and
with so little parade of learning, and it has been too lightly
assumed that the statement in _Orthodoxy_ that he avoided works of
Christian Apologetic meant that he had not read any of the great
Christian writers of the past. True, he was not then or at any time
reading books of Apologetic. He must, however, have been reading
something more life-giving, as we learn from a single hint. Asked to
draw up a Scheme of Reading for 1908 in _G.K.'s Weekly_, he suggests
Butler's _Analogy_, Coleridge's _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_,
Newman's _Apologia_, St. Augustine's _Confessions_ and the _Summa_ of
St. Thomas Aquinas.

It was absurd, he said in this article, to suppose that the ancients
did not see our modern problems. The truth was that the great
ancients not only saw them, but saw through them. Butler had sketched
the "real line along which Christianity must ultimately be defended."
These great writers all remained modern, while the "New Theology"
takes one back to the time of crinolines. "I almost expect to see Mr.
R. J. Campbell in peg-top trousers, with very long side-whiskers."

In this controversy, although not yet a Catholic, he showed the gulf
between the Modernist theory of development and the Newman doctrine,
with a clarity greater than any Catholic writer of the time.

A man who is always going back and picking to pieces his own first
principles may be having an amusing time but he is not developing as
Newman understood development. Newman meant that if you wanted a tree
to grow you must plant it finally in some definite spot. It may be (I
do not know and I do not care) that Catholic Chri