two entirely different interpretations of what they
mean. This is certainly the case with any very recent period, and
perhaps especially with our own recent history. We have within living
memory ended a period and begun an exceedingly different period, and
we tend to judge the former by the light--or the darkness--of the
latter. The Victorian age, even in its extreme old age, was still
tacitly assuming and legally enforcing as axioms the Christian moral
system, especially in regard to marriage and all sex questions, and
the sacred nature of property. To read many disquisitions on that
period today one would suppose that no one living really believed in
these things: that humbug explained the first and greed the second.

This is surely a false perspective. The age was an enormously
conventional one: these fundamental ideas had become fossilized and
meaningless for an increasing number of younger people. But when
Bernard Shaw called himself an atheist out of a kind of insane
generosity towards Bradlaugh (see his letter to G.K. later in this
chapter) or described all property as theft, it was a real moral
indignation that was roused in many minds. Real, but exceedingly
confused. It testified to the need of the ordinary man to live by a
creed that he need not question. Shaw and Chesterton were
philosophers, and philosophers love asking questions as well as
answering them. But the average man wants to live by his creed, not
question it, and the elder Victorians had still some kind of creed.

There were many who believed in God. There were others who believed
that the Christian moral system must remain, because it had commended
itself to man's nature as the highest and best and was the true fruit
of evolutionary progress. There were certainly some who were angry
because they thought chaos must follow any tampering with the
existing social order. But if you take the mass of those who tried to
laugh Bernard Shaw aside and grew angry when they could not do so,
you find at the root of the anger an intense dislike of having any
part of a system questioned which was to them unquestionable, which
they had erected into a creed. They thought Shaw's ideas dangerous
and wanted to keep them from the young. They did not want anyone to
ask how a civilisation had laid its principles open to this brilliant
and effective siege. They hated Shaw's questions before they began to
hate his answers. And that is probably why so many linked Chestert