was an English yachtsman who set out
upon a voyage, miscalculated his course, and discovered what he thought
to be a new island in the South Seas. It transpired afterwards that he
had run up his flag on the pavilion of Brighton, and that he had
discovered England. That yachtsman is Mr. Chesterton himself. Sailing
the great sea of moral and spiritual speculation, he discovered a land
of facts and convictions to which his own experience had guided him. On
that strange land he ran up his flag, only to make the further and more
astonishing discovery that it was the Christian faith at which he had
arrived. Nietzsche had preached to him, as to Mr. Bernard Shaw, his
great precept, "Follow your own will." But when Mr. Chesterton obeyed he
arrived, not at Superman, but at the ordinary old-fashioned morality.
That, he found, is what we like best in our deepest hearts, and desire
most. So he too "discovered England."

He begins, like Margaret Fuller, with the fundamental principle of
accepting the universe. The thing we know best and most directly is
human nature in all its breadth. It is indeed the one thing immediately
known and knowable. Like R.L. Stevenson, he perceives how tragically and
comically astonishing a phenomenon is man. "What a monstrous spectre is
this man," says Stevenson, "the disease of the agglutinated dust,
lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding,
growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair
like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing
to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier, known as his
fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes!" In like manner Mr.
Chesterton discovers man--that appalling mass of paradox and
contradiction--and it is the supreme discovery in any spiritual search.

Having discovered the fundamental fact of human nature, he at once gives
in his allegiance to it. "Our attitude towards life can be better
expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of
criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism,
it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world
is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is
miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the
turret, and the more miserable it is, the less we should leave it."

There is a splendid courage and heartiness in his complete acceptance