merely with the
sense of the cleverness of him who utters it, but with the sense of how
many strange coincidences exist around us, and how many sentences, when
turned outside in, will yield new and startling truths. However much we
may suspect that the performance we are watching is too clever to be
trustworthy, yet after all the world does appear to lend itself to such
treatment.

There is, for example, the paradox of the love of the world--"Somehow
one must love the world without being worldly." Again, "Courage is
almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking
the form of a readiness to die." The martyr differs from the suicide in
that he cherishes a disdain of death, while the motive of the suicide is
a disdain of life. Charity, too, is a paradox, for it means "one of two
things--pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people."
Similarly Christian humility has a background of unheard-of arrogance,
and Christian liberty is possible only to the most abject bondsmen in
the world.

This long consideration of Mr. Chesterton's use of paradox is more
relevant to our present subject than it may seem. For, curiously enough,
the habit of paradox has been his way of entrance into faith. At the age
of sixteen he was a complete agnostic, and it was the reading of Huxley
and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh which brought him back to orthodox
theology. For, as he read, he found that Christianity was attacked on
all sides, and for all manner of contradictory reasons; and this
discovery led him to the conviction that Christianity must be a very
extraordinary thing, abounding in paradox. But he had already discovered
the abundant element of paradox in life; and when he analysed the two
sets of paradoxes he found them to be precisely the same. So he became a
Christian.

It may seem a curious way to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who are
accustomed to regard the strait gate as of Gothic architecture may be
shocked to find a man professing to have entered through this
Alhambra-like portal. But it is a lesson we all have to learn sooner or
later, that there are at least eleven gates besides our own, and that
every man has to enter by that which he finds available. Paradox is the
only gate by which Mr. Chesterton could get into any place, and the
Kingdom of Heaven is no exception to the rule.

His account of this entrance is characteristic. It is given in the first
chapter of his _Orthodoxy_. There