e Book of Job_.

BECAUSE _Orthodoxy_ is supremely Chesterton's own history of his mind
more must be said of it than of his other published works. For "This
book is the life of a man. And a man is his mind." The Notebook shows
him thinking and feeling in his youth exactly on the lines that he
recalls--but they were only lines--in fact an outline. The richness
of life was needed, the richness of thought, to turn the outline into
the masterpiece. No man, not even Chesterton, could have written
_Orthodoxy_ at the age of twenty. It was sufficiently remarkable that
he should have written it at thirty-five: but only a man who had been
thinking along those lines at twenty and much earlier could have
written it at all. For the book is as he says "a sort of slovenly
autobiography." It is not so much an argument for Orthodoxy as the
story of how one man discovered Orthodoxy as the only answer to the
riddle of the universe.

In an interview, given shortly after its publication, Gilbert told of
a temptation that had once been his and which he had overcome almost
before he realized he had been tempted. That temptation was to become
a prophet like all the men in _Heretics_, by emphasizing one aspect of
truth and ignoring the others. To do this would, he knew, bring him a
great crowd of disciples. He had a vision--which constantly grew
wider and deeper--of the many-sided unity of Truth, but he saw that
all the prophets of the age, from Walt Whitman and Schopenhauer to
Wells and Shaw, had become so by taking one side of truth and making
it all of truth. It is so much easier to see and magnify a part than
laboriously to strive to embrace the whole:

. . . a sage feels too small for life,
And a fool too large for it.

Not that he condemned as fools the able men of his generation. For
Wells he had a great esteem, for Shaw a greater. Whitman he had in
his youth almost idolized. But increasingly he recognized even
Whitman as representing an idea that was too narrow because it was
only an aspect. There was not room in Whitman's philosophy for some
of the facts he had already discovered and he felt he had not yet
completed his journey. He must not, for the sake of being a prophet
and of having a following, sacrifice--I will not say a truth already
found, but a truth that might still be lurking somewhere. He could
not be the architect of his own intellectual universe any more than
he had been the creator of sun, moon and earth. "God