was so native to his mind; it was so naturally a fruit
of his mental character that he had difficulty in understanding why
others did not use it with the same lavish facility as himself.

I can speak here with experience, for in these conversations with
him or listening to his conversation with others I was always
astonished at an ability in illustration which I not only have never
seen equalled, but cannot remember to have seen attempted. He never
sought such things; they poured out from him as easily as though they
were not the hard forged products of intense vision, but spontaneous
remarks.*

[* _On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters_, pp. 36-41.]

To return to the Blatchford controversy: a final point of interest is
a psychological one. G.K. admits his difficulty in using in his
arguments the reverent solemnity of the Agnostic. He realizes that he
is thought flippant because he is amusing on a subject where he is
more certain than "of the existence of the moon. . . . Christianity
is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a
certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded Rationalists
might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery." But if this is his own
psychology he faces too the special difficulty of theirs--the main
and towering barrier that he wished but hardly hoped to surmount. He
was the first person, I think, to see that Free Thought was no longer
a young movement, but old and even fossilized. It had formed minds
which were now too set to be altered. It had its own dogmas and its
own most rigid orthodoxy. "You are armed to the teeth," he told the
readers of the _Clarion_, "and buttoned up to the chin with the great
agnostic Orthodoxy, perhaps the most placid and perfect of all the
orthodoxies of men. . . . I approach you with the reverence and the
courage due to a bench of bishops."

The _Clarion_ controversy was, as we have seen, in 1903 and
1904, when Chesterton was approaching thirty. Others of those
I have mentioned came later. But I don't think any or even all
of them fully explain the depth and richness of _Orthodoxy_.

CHAPTER XIII

Orthodoxy

_Philosophy is either eternal or it is not philosophy. . . . A cosmic
philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is
constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private
religion than he can possess a private sun and moon_.

_Introduction to th