evident
experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not really new. My
friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of making everything
entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it
shifts on to another.... It would be nice if we could be shaved without
troubling anybody. It would be nicer still if we could go unshaved
without annoying anybody--

"'But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand,
Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.

Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it under
strange limitations, and with painful conditions of pleasure.... But
every now and then men jump up with the new something or other and say
that everything can be had without sacrifice, that bad is good if you
are only enlightened, and that there is no real difference between being
shaved and not being shaved. The difference, they say, is only a
difference of degree; everything is evolutionary and relative.
Shavedness is immanent in man.... I have been profoundly interested in
what you have told me about the New Shaving. Have you ever heard of a
thing called the New Theology?' He smiled and said that he had not."

In contrast with all this, it is Mr. Chesterton's conviction that the
facts must be unflinchingly and in their entirety accepted. With
characteristic courage he goes straight to the root of the matter and
begins with the fact of sin. "If it be true (as it certainly is) that a
man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious
philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the
existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union
between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to
think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat." It is as if
he said, Here you have direct and unmistakable experience. A man knows
his sin as he knows himself. He may explain it in either one way or
another way. He may interpret the universe accordingly in terms either
of heaven or of hell. But the one unreasonable and impossible thing to
do is to deny the experience itself.

It is thus that he treats the question of faith all along the line. If
you are going to be a Christian, or even fairly to judge Christianity,
you must accept the whole of Christ's teaching, with all its
contradictions, paradoxes, and the rest. Some men select his charity,
others his social teaching, others his moral rele