by
not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to
whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my
mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a
remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man
had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods; he had saved them from
a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel
it. And all the time I had not even thought of Christian theology.*

[* Ibid., pp. 155-6.]

This theology came with the answers to all the tremendous questions
asked by life. Here the convert has one great advantage over the
Catholic brought up in the Faith. Most of us hear the answers before
we have asked the questions: hence intellectually we lack what G.K.
calls "the soils for the seeds of doctrine." It is nearly impossible
to understand an answer to a question you have not formulated. And
without the sense of urgency that an insistent question brings, many
people do not even try. All the years of his boyhood and early
manhood Chesterton was facing the fundamental questions and hammering
out his answers. At first he had no thought of Christianity as even a
possible answer. Growing up in a world called Christian, he fancied
it a philosophy that had been tried and found wanting. It was only as
he realized that the answers he was finding for himself always fitted
into, were always confirmed by, the Christian view of things that he
began to turn towards it. He sees a good deal of humour in the way he
strained his voice in a painfully juvenile attempt to utter his new
truths, only to find that they were not his and were not new, but
were part of an eternal philosophy.

In the chapter called "The Flag of the World" he tells of the moment
when he discovered the confirmation and reinforcing of his own
speculations by the Christian theology. The point at which this came
concerned his feelings about the men of his youth who labelled
themselves Optimist and Pessimist. Both, he felt, were wrong. It must
be possible at once to love and to hate the world, to love it more
than enough to get on with it, to hate it enough to get it on. And
the Church solved this difficulty by her doctrine of creation and of
Original Sin. "God had written not so much a poem, but rather a play;
a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left
to human actors and stage-managers who had since made a great mess of