Justified True Belief

(●) A London journalist who set out to invent a faith of his own and found the church had published it first. + There is a story people still tell about him. Somewhere on a lecture tour a very large man in a cloak stands in a railway station, cannot think which town he is supposed to be speaking in, and wires home to ask where he ought to be. He told it himself in his Autobiography, giving the telegram as "Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" and adding that he could not remember whether it was true, only that it was not unlikely. The answer that has clung to it ever since, "Home," belongs to the retellings rather than to any account of his own. Even so, it is the right kind of story about a man who mislaid trains, hats, umbrellas and whole manuscripts, and never once mislaid the thread of an argument. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was not a professor, and he was not a clergyman. He was a working newspaperman who wrote a column most weeks for thirty years, which means he did his theology in public, in cheap print, against deadlines, arguing with the most famous unbelievers in England while staying on affectionate terms with every one of them. George Bernard Shaw, whose whole philosophy he set out to demolish in print, called him a man of colossal genius and badgered him for years into writing a play. That combination, total disagreement and real friendship, is most of what he has to teach anyone who wants to defend the faith in public now. He belongs on a Christian shelf for two books above all. Orthodoxy (1908) tells the story of how he reasoned his way from a fashionable pessimism to the Apostles’ Creed, and it does it as comedy rather than as a syllogism, a chain of premises marching in step to a conclusion. The Everlasting Man (1925) retells the whole human story with Christ at its center, and a young Oxford atheist named C. S. Lewis read it and never got his unbelief back in one piece. Then there is the sheer volume, which is the signature fact about him: around eighty books, some two hundred short stories, several plays, hundreds of poems, and, by the usual count, more than four thousand newspaper essays, most of them dictated aloud while a secretary typed.

(●) 1874 AD: Born in Kensington to a comfortable London family, a slow boy who drew before he read. + He was born on 29 May 1874 in Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill, in Kensington, and christened at St George’s, Campden Hill. His father Edward Chesterton was a partner in the family estate agency and, by his son’s account, a man who would rather build a toy theatre than sell a house. His mother, Marie Louise Grosjean, came of Swiss and Scottish stock. It was a Victorian household of the mild liberal sort, Unitarian by descent, from a tradition that had set the doctrine of the Trinity aside, and not much troubled about doctrine of any other kind either. Books lay about, and nobody minded if a child read them. He was also slow. He learned to read late, and he was still drawing pictures in the margins of everything when his classmates were construing Latin, working a sentence of it out word by word. He went to St Paul’s School in 1887, where he was remembered as huge, absent-minded and apparently idle, and where he and a handful of friends founded a Junior Debating Club that argued about everything and printed its own magazine. The friendships made there lasted his whole life. So did the habit of drawing. He illustrated other men’s books for years, and he thought in pictures first and sentences second, which is why his arguments so often arrive as scenes rather than as proofs.

(●) 1893 AD: Art school pulled him into a private darkness, and he came out of it convinced that existing at all is a gift. + Instead of university he went to the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, coming to it after a year at an art school in St John’s Wood, and he left in 1895 with no degree in the drawing or in the English literature lectures he also sat in on. The Slade years were the worst of his life. He wrote about them decades later in a chapter of his Autobiography he called "How to Be a Lunatic," which tells you most of what he had come to think of them. What happened was not a scandal but a philosophy. The art of the moment was Impressionism, the new painting that set down the light falling on the eye and left out everything the mind was in the habit of adding to it, and a clever, unhappy young man took its lesson in the most literal way available: if a painter can record only the light striking his eye, then perhaps there is nothing there but the light striking his eye. Push that far enough and other people stop being real, and you are left as the one thing you can be sure of. Philosophers call it solipsism, the suspicion that your own mind is all there is, and it is a very different thing to be visited by than to read about. He and his brother Cecil played with a planchette board, the parlour spiritualism of the day, a small board on wheels that held a pencil and was supposed to write out messages under the hands resting on it, and he found himself producing things he did not like. He said afterwards that he had gone down into the cellar of the mind and touched the possibility that evil is simply what one wants. He climbed out by a route that shaped everything he wrote afterwards, and the route was not an argument. If the worst thought is that nothing exists, then the smallest fact that something exists is worth being glad about, so gratitude, and not proof, was the first rung. He put it later as a kind of minimum creed: a man ought to thank somebody for the gift of two legs. He did not yet know whom he was thanking. The rest of his life was the working out of that question.

(●) 1901 AD: He married Frances Blogg, took up journalism, and began arguing in print with everyone he admired. + He had left the Slade for the publishing trade, reading manuscripts first for George Redway and then for T. Fisher Unwin. On 28 June 1901 he married Frances Blogg, a devout Anglican whose faith was steadier and more practical than his own and who spent the next thirty-five years managing the trains he missed and the money he gave away. They had no children, and both of them felt it. The affection for other people’s children that runs through his writing is not a literary pose. It was Frances who chose Beaconsfield, a small town twenty-five miles from London, and they moved there in 1909 and stayed. The journalism began at once. He wrote a weekly column for the Daily News from 1901, and from 1905 a weekly essay for the Illustrated London News that he kept up for thirty years, roughly fifteen hundred of them. The subjects were whatever came to hand: hansom cabs, cheese, chalk, lying in bed, the running of the British Empire. He could turn any of them toward first principles inside a paragraph. He also picked fights, and this is the part worth studying. He debated the socialist Robert Blatchford about determinism, the view that everything a person does was already settled by what came before it, H. G. Wells about progress, and Shaw about nearly everything, on platforms and in print, for decades. The rule he kept was simple: go after the idea with everything you have and never go after the man. When Shaw’s wife was ill Chesterton wrote to him tenderly; when Chesterton nearly died, Shaw wrote to Frances offering money. A generation of readers learned from watching them that you can think another man’s creed is a catastrophe and still want him at your table.

(●) 1908 AD: Dared by a reviewer to state his own philosophy, he wrote Orthodoxy. + In 1905 he published Heretics, a book that went through the celebrated thinkers of the day one at a time, by name, and argued that each of them had built a world too small to live in. It was cheerful and it was devastating, and one reviewer, G. S. Street, made the obvious reply: Mr Chesterton tells everyone else to declare his cosmic theory, and has carefully avoided declaring his own. Street said he would start worrying about his philosophy when Chesterton gave us his. It was a fair hit, and Chesterton took it as one. He opened Orthodoxy by admitting that the whole book existed because of that dare, and that Street need not read it. Then he told the story of his own mind as a comedy. Imagine, he says, an English yachtsman who miscalculates his course and discovers England under the impression that it is an undiscovered island in the South Seas, and then slowly works out where he is standing. That, he says, is exactly what happened to him. He had worked out a philosophy of his own, thinking himself the first man ever to reach it, and found on arrival that it was the Apostles’ Creed. In his own words, he tried to found a heresy of his own, and when he had put the last touches to it he discovered that it was orthodoxy. The same year he published The Man Who Was Thursday, a nightmare thriller in which a squad of undercover policemen infiltrate an anarchist council and each discovers that all the others are policemen too. He subtitled it "A Nightmare," and warned readers ever afterwards that it was about the doubts of a young man in the 1890s rather than a statement of what he had come to believe. Both books came out of the same recovery.

(●) 1922 AD: After a public scandal, a near-fatal illness and his brother’s death, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church at forty-eight, by the priest behind Father Brown. + The years between are the hardest of the life. In 1912 his brother Cecil, running a small paper called the Eye-Witness, accused ministers and financiers of corruptly profiting from a government contract with the Marconi wireless company. Cecil was prosecuted for criminal libel, the crime of publishing a damaging accusation you cannot make good in court, and convicted in 1913, and Gilbert stood by him throughout. Some of the charges had substance and were later conceded. The campaign that carried them was also ugly about the men it named, and both halves of that belong in the record. At the end of 1914 Chesterton collapsed and lay unconscious for weeks, his heart and kidneys failing, and nobody expected him to live. He came back at Easter 1915. Three years later, on 6 December 1918, Cecil died of nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys, in a French military hospital just after the Armistice. Gilbert had taken the paper over in 1916, when Cecil enlisted, and he kept it going as a debt to his brother until it closed in 1923, then started G. K.’s Weekly in 1925. He had been drawn to Rome since a visit to Palestine in 1919 and 1920, and Frances, who was more settled where she was, watched him hesitate for years. On 30 July 1922 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church in the ballroom of the Railway Hotel at Beaconsfield, because the parish had no church building of its own yet, by Father John O’Connor, the Yorkshire priest whose ordinary sanity and unshockable knowledge of human wickedness had given him Father Brown a decade earlier. Dom Ignatius Rice, a Benedictine monk, was the other witness with Frances. The two priests agreed to say nothing and see how long the newspapers took to find out. It took three weeks. Frances was received four years later.

(●) 1925 AD: The Everlasting Man retold the human story with Christ at its center, and an Oxford atheist read it. + H. G. Wells had published The Outline of History in 1920, a vast popular narrative in which religion is a stage the species passes through and Jesus of Nazareth is a good man among other good men. It sold in the millions. The Everlasting Man is Chesterton’s answer, and it works by refusing the flattening. Part one argues that man is not simply a clever animal but a break in the record, a creature who draws on cave walls and buries his dead. Part two argues that Christ is not simply a clever man but a second break, and that the attempt to file him among the founders of religions keeps failing because he does not fit the shelf. The book’s method is worth naming, because apologists have used it ever since. He asks the reader to look at something familiar as though seeing it for the first time, the way a traveller coming home sees the ordinary streets of a town he has lived in all his life. Comparative religion, the study that sets the world’s faiths side by side and looks for the shared pattern, makes Christianity look like one myth among many when it is done from the inside, by people who grew up breathing it. Done from the outside, from the standpoint of a man who has never heard of any of them, the differences stand out and refuse to blur. Early in 1926 C. S. Lewis read it. He was then a young don at Oxford, a college teacher and tutor, and a settled atheist, and he later wrote that the book showed him the whole Christian outline of history in a form that made sense. He also noted, drily, that a young man who wants to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful about what he reads.

(●) 1936 AD: He died at Beaconsfield at sixty-two, and a Pope called him a defender of the faith. + The last decade was busy and increasingly frail. He took to the wireless late and easily: he broadcast for the BBC from 1932 and turned out to be a natural at it, so much so that a producer said he could have had the whole nation listening within a year. The books kept coming too. He wrote Chaucer in 1932, and in 1933 St. Thomas Aquinas, largely by dictation. In 1934 Pope Pius XI made him a Knight Commander with Star of the Order of St Gregory the Great, an honour the popes give to laypeople for service to the church. He was, by then, around six feet four and enormous, and the heart that had nearly stopped in 1914 was failing. He died at home at Top Meadow, Beaconsfield, on 14 June 1936, of congestive heart failure, at sixty-two. The requiem Mass, the Mass the church offers for its dead, was sung at Westminster Cathedral on 27 June, and Monsignor Ronald Knox preached it. A telegram came from Rome on behalf of Pius XI, sent by Cardinal Pacelli, who would himself be Pope within three years, calling him a devoted son of the church and a gifted defender of the Catholic faith. He is buried in the Catholic cemetery at Beaconsfield. His Autobiography came out that autumn. He had written it partly under protest, on the grounds that he had never been able to remember anything accurately. Its last chapter opens with him seated on a summer evening taking a serene review of what he calls an indefensibly fortunate and happy life, and it closes where the book began, on a figure carrying a golden key, who turns out to be Peter the fisherman.

What He Taught

(T1) Existence is a gift before it is a problem, and gratitude is the sane response to it. + Watch a small child on a swing. Push her once and she says "again." Push her forty times and she still says "again," with undiminished delight, long after your arms have given out. Chesterton took that as evidence about the universe rather than about children. Adults call the sunrise monotonous because they are tired, and monotony is largely what tiredness feels like from the inside; a being with unlimited vitality might call for the sun every morning the way a child calls for the swing, and mean it every time. That is the argument of the chapter he called "The Ethics of Elfland," and it is a strange kind of argument, because it does not start from a proof. It starts from a mood he thought most people have and most philosophies talk them out of: the sense that being alive at all is startling, that legs and daisies and cheese are not owed to anybody, and that a person who receives a present naturally looks around for someone to thank. He had felt exactly that coming out of the Slade, years before he had any theology to hang it on. The Christian claim he eventually reached is that the instinct is telling the truth, and that there is in fact someone to thank (James 1:17). The obligation runs the other way too. If the world is a gift, then contempt for it is not sophistication but bad manners, which is why he is the great enemy of world-weariness, and why he kept insisting that seeing rightly is a childlike thing rather than a childish one (Matthew 18:3).

(Q) "The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom." + Source: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter IV, "The Ethics of Elfland" (1908). He is describing the state he was in before he had a creed: convinced that life was an adventure worth being glad about, and unable to name the giver. The sentences immediately after it ask whether a man who thanks Santa Claus for toys can thank nobody for the birthday present of birth.

(T2) The man who can explain everything has usually lost everything except his explanation. + Suppose a man tells you, quite calmly, that a conspiracy is following him. You point out that nobody in the street so much as looked at him. He answers that of course they did not look, because looking would have given them away. You offer another fact and it becomes another proof. His theory covers the evidence completely, and that completeness is the symptom rather than the strength. He has not lost his reasoning. His reasoning is the only thing he has left, running on with nothing outside it to check it against. Chesterton called the chapter "The Maniac," and used the madhouse as a diagnostic tool on the intellectual systems of his day. Materialism, the view that matter in motion is all there is, explains everything a Christian explains and does it with fewer moving parts, and he granted that freely. His objection was that it explains everything in a much smaller way, exactly as the conspiracy explains everything in a much smaller way. It still has to account for a man’s love, his sense of duty, and his conviction that his own thinking is worth trusting, and each of those has to come out thinner than it went in. Underneath is a point about reason itself. Reason is an act of faith, he said, since the first assertion any thinker makes is that his own thoughts have some hold on reality, and that assertion cannot be proved by the thoughts in question without going in a circle. There is a trap waiting for any theory that reduces thinking to the rattle of atoms, then, because the theory is itself a piece of thinking, and it has just told you what thinking is worth. Cut the ground out from under that trust and you have not become more rational; you have sawn off the branch you were sitting on. C. S. Lewis later built the case out at length in Miracles, and it has gone by the name the argument from reason ever since.

(Q) "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." + Source: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter II, "The Maniac" (1908). The paragraph that follows explains why this matters for argument: the insane explanation is not weak but airtight, and a debater who insists on a completely watertight theory has told you less about the world than he thinks (T2).

(T3) Doctrine is not the cage around the adventure; it is what keeps the adventure from ending in a ditch. + A cyclist taking a corner fast looks, from the pavement, like a man about to fall. He is not being cautious, whatever it looks like. He is holding a line that is one line among an infinite number of ways to go down, and the speed is the whole point of the exercise. Take away the balance and you do not get freedom, you get gravel. That is Chesterton’s picture of what the early church was doing when it argued about words. To a modern reader the creeds look like fences: a committee ruling out what people may think, and a rather dusty committee at that. He asks the reader to look at the same events as a chase instead. The church had to keep insisting that Christ was fully God and fully man, that matter is good and that the world was made rather than emanated, that is, spoken into being by God rather than seeping out of him by degrees, and that God is both transcendent, wholly above and beyond the world he made, and near enough to be spoken to. Each of those is a narrow line with an easy fall on either side, and he goes through the falls by name. Every heresy, meaning every version of the faith the church ended up ruling out, is simpler than the creed, which is exactly what makes it easier to hold and less able to carry a life. His conclusion is the sentence people remember: orthodoxy is the thrilling thing, and there never was anything so perilous or so exciting. It is worth being precise about what he is and is not claiming. He is not arguing that Christianity is true because it is exciting. He is answering a specific charge, that the historic faith is dull, safe and restrictive, and he answers it by pointing out that the record shows a two-thousand-year swerve between opposite errors, which is what balance at speed looks like from the pavement.

(Q) "It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands." + Source: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter VI, "The Paradoxes of Christianity" (1908). The sentence just after it names the fads the church might have fallen into, from Gnosticism to Christian Science, and the image he is building toward is a heavenly chariot flying thundering through the ages, swerving and staying upright. Earlier in the same chapter he writes that this is the thrilling romance of orthodoxy, and that people have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe.

(T4) The dead get a vote, and tradition is what counting it looks like. + Picture a village that lets everybody vote except the people lying in the churchyard. That is the arrangement Chesterton wanted a reason for, and the argument he made runs from democracy rather than against it. If you believe that ordinary people should not be disqualified from a say by the accident of their birth, then you need a reason why they should be disqualified by the accident of their death. He could not find one. So he proposed that the vote be extended backwards: to the villagers who kept a legend alive for centuries, and not only to the one educated man now living who has written a book saying they were wrong. He was answering the confident progressive assumption that the present generation is the jury and the past is the defendant. His counter-question is who elected the present. A fashion in ideas lasts about as long as a fashion in hats, and the test of whether a belief is merely modern is whether it can survive being unfashionable. The bearing on Christianity is direct. A faith that has been believed in every century, on every continent, by fishermen and philosophers, has a kind of evidence behind it that a clever new theory in a periodical does not. That is not a proof, and he did not offer it as one. It is a reason to give the accumulated verdict a hearing before overturning it, and it is the same instinct that makes a sensible person slow to tear down a fence in a field until he has found out why somebody troubled to put it there.

(Q) "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead." + Source: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter IV, "The Ethics of Elfland" (1908). The next sentences make the political point explicit: tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about, and objects to men being disqualified by the accident of death as democracy objects to their being disqualified by the accident of birth.

(T5) Christ is not one story among the world’s stories; he is where the stories and the arguments meet. + Ancient people did two quite separate things with their minds, and Chesterton’s point in The Everlasting Man is that they knew perfectly well they were doing two things. In the temple a Greek told stories about gods who fell in love and quarrelled and died, and he told them the way we tell stories, with the part of himself that knows the difference between a story and a report. In the lecture hall the same Greek listened to a philosopher argue about the One and the Good, and nobody ever sacrificed a goat to the Good. Myth reached for God through the imagination; philosophy reached for him through argument; and the two rivers ran alongside each other for centuries without joining. The Christian claim, on his reading, is that they join. The doctrine of the Incarnation, the teaching that the eternal Word took on a real human life at a datable moment, means that the thing philosophy had been arguing toward walked into the world as a person with a mother and an address (John 1:14). That is why the gospel refuses to sit quietly on the shelf of comparative religion. It has the shape of a story, so a scholar can line it up with the dying-and-rising gods, the figures of the old myths who go down into the earth and come back with the turning year, and produce a chart. It also has dates, witnesses and a tomb outside a specific city, which the dying-and-rising gods do not, and a chart that ignores that is not comparing like with like. He was writing before the mid-century debates about myth and history and the arguments made in them, and he does not settle those. What he does is refuse the move that treats resemblance as identity, and he refuses it not with a rule but by making the reader feel the difference between a tale told at a hearth and a report brought back from a road.

(Q) "It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story." + Source: G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, part II, chapter V, "The Escape from Paganism" (1925). He is speaking as a Catholic and writing of the Catholic faith, and the point he is making about story and philosophy is one Christians hold in common. The sentence just before says the faith reconciles mythology and philosophy because it realises both; the sentence just after says it is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies, only it is a philosophy that is like life.

(Q) "Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave." + Source: G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, part II, chapter VI, "The Five Deaths of the Faith" (1925). The chapter is his answer to the observation, common in his day and in ours, that Christianity keeps being pronounced finished. He grants the deaths, and counts five of them by name: the Arian crisis, the Albigensian, the humanist sceptic, the years after Voltaire and the years after Darwin. His interest is in what happens next: at the end of each of those revolutions the same religion is found on top again, converting the new age as though it were a new religion.

What Christian Readers Made of Him

(†) He made the creed sound interesting again to a generation that had been told it was over. + The educated English world Chesterton wrote into had largely decided that Christianity was a spent respectability: decent, dull, and on its way out, with the future belonging to science, socialism or Nietzsche. What he did, before he did anything else, was refuse the adjective. He talked about the Trinity and the Fall as though they were the most startling news in the paper, and he did it in the same voice he used for detective stories, which meant he was read by people who would never in their lives have opened a work of theology. The people who said so afterwards are worth naming. Dorothy L. Sayers, writing years later, called him "a kind of Christian liberator" for the young people of her generation, and said he had let fresh air into a church that had grown stuffy. Ronald Knox, who preached his requiem, was a friend and correspondent through his own Catholic years. The Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan, received into the Catholic Church in 1937, said that if he had not come across Chesterton he would have stayed an agnostic for years more. And the Catholic Worker movement that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin ran in New York drew its economics from the distributism Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc had argued for: a preference for small property widely spread over both the big employer and the big state. None of that was the work of a system. He never wrote a systematic theology and would have been bad at it. What he had was the ability to make a reader see a familiar doctrine from an angle that made it strange again, and for a great many people being made to look twice was the first step back.

(†) C. S. Lewis picked up The Everlasting Man as an atheist and never got his unbelief back in one piece. + Lewis met Chesterton first in a field hospital in France early in 1918, reading a volume of essays while he lay there with trench fever, and liked him without at all agreeing with him. The serious damage came later. Early in 1926, by his own account in his memoir, he read The Everlasting Man, and it did what no argument had managed to do: it showed him the Christian account of history as a whole, and the whole made sense in a way the pieces never had. By his own dating he gave in and admitted that God was God in 1929, and came to believe in Christ two years after that. Lewis said so publicly for the rest of his life. Writing to an American correspondent in 1950 he called The Everlasting Man the best popular apologetic he knew, and in 1962 he included it in a published list of the ten books that had most shaped his thought. The debt shows in the work. The trilemma about Christ’s claims, the argument that a man who said the things Jesus said is a liar, a lunatic, or exactly who he claimed to be, the refusal to let Jesus be filed as a great moral teacher, and the argument from reason all have Chestertonian ancestry, though Lewis sharpened them into forms Chesterton never bothered to give them. Through Lewis the method reached everyone Lewis reached, which is most of English-speaking Christianity since the war. Arguing for the faith through story and image rather than through syllogism alone, and aiming at the reader’s imagination on the way to the reader’s reason, is the family trade Chesterton started. It answers the apostolic instruction to be ready with a reason for the hope that is in you, with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15), by first persuading the reader that the hope is worth asking about.

(†) The specialists found that the amateur had got the hard things right. + It is easy to assume that a journalist writing fast about difficult subjects must be producing charm without substance. The assumption is a fair one to start with, and it is worth testing against the people who knew the material from the inside. In 1933 Chesterton dictated a short life of Thomas Aquinas, having, by his secretary’s account, sent out for a stack of books he then barely opened. Étienne Gilson, the leading historian of medieval philosophy of the century, read it and told Chesterton’s biographer Maisie Ward that it was "the best book ever written on St. Thomas," and that Chesterton had made him despair, since Gilson had studied Aquinas all his life and could not have written it. That is not a compliment to the prose. It is a judgment that the man had seen what Aquinas was actually doing. The people who knew literature said much the same thing. His Charles Dickens of 1906 is generally credited with beginning the serious modern rehabilitation of a novelist the critics of the day had written off as a vulgar entertainer, and T. S. Eliot, who disagreed with him about much and thought his verse no more than good journalistic balladry, wrote in The Tablet the week he died that the book on Dickens seemed to him the best essay on that author that had ever been written. The pattern holds across his work: he was careless about references and dates, and he was very often right about the thing itself.

(†) Where he fell short: he carried the anti-Jewish habits of his class into print, and his history could turn partisan. + The ledger has to record what stands in his own pages, and two things do, with what fairness requires set between them. - The Jewish question. Chesterton returned again and again to what he called the problem of the Jews in England, and the recurring figure of the cosmopolitan financier in his journalism and his verse is a caricature with a long and evil history behind it. He backed his brother’s Marconi campaign of 1912 and 1913, which pressed a real question about ministerial corruption in language about the men involved that was ugly on the face of it. In The New Jerusalem (1920) he proposed, in a chapter arguing that the Jews are a nation and should have a homeland, a single-clause law requiring every Jew in England to be dressed like an Arab: let him sit on the Woolsack, the seat the Lord Chancellor then kept in the House of Lords and about as high as an English public career reached, but let him sit there dressed as an Arab. He meant it as a demonstration that a distinct nation should be visible rather than as a call to persecution, and it is still a proposal to mark a people out by statute. Scripture leaves no room for it. The gospel forbids partiality outright (James 2:1), and Paul, facing the question of Israel directly, answers it in the strongest terms available to him (Romans 11:1). - The other side of his own record. Fairness requires the rest of the story. He opposed the persecution of Jews wherever it turned violent, and when the Nazis came to power he said so publicly, telling the Jewish Chronicle in September 1933 that he was appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities, that they had no reason or logic behind them, and that they were the expedient of a man who had gone looking for a scapegoat and found the most famous one in European history. A year after his death Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote that when Hitlerism came Chesterton was among the first to speak out. Both halves are true, and the second does not cancel the first: a man can be genuinely horrified by a persecution he helped supply with vocabulary. - Partisan history. After 1922 his account of the Reformation hardened into something closer to advocacy than to history, and his treatment of Protestant Christianity in the later polemical books does not always argue with the strongest form of the case, which was the standard his own best work had set. Readers of every communion have learned from Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, and that is a fair measure of where he was writing at his best and where he was writing at his most tribal.