the
discovery of England. He set out to find the empirical truth of human
nature and the meaning of human life, as these are to be explored in
experience. When he found them, it was infinitely surprising to him to
become aware that the system in which his faith had come at last to rest
was just Christianity--the only system which could offer any adequate
and indeed exact account of human nature. The articles of its creed he
recognised as the points of conviction which are absolutely necessary to
the understanding of human nature and to the living of human life.

Thus it comes to pass that in the midst of a time resounding with pagan
voices old and new, he stands for an unflinching idealism. It is the
mark of pagans that they are children of Nature, boasting that Nature is
their mother: they are solemnised by that still and unresponsive
maternity, or driven into rebellion by discovering that the so-called
mother is but a harsh stepmother after all. Mr. Chesterton loves Nature,
because Christianity has revealed to him that she is but his sister,
child of the same Father. "We can be proud of her beauty, since we have
the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire,
but not to imitate."

It follows that two worlds are his, as is the case with all true
idealists. The modern reversion to paganism is founded on the
fundamental error that Christianity is alien to Nature, setting up
against her freedom the repellent ideal of asceticism, and frowning upon
her beauty with the scowl of the harsh moralist. For Mr. Chesterton the
bleakness is all on the side of the pagans, and the beauty with the
idealists. They do not look askance at the green earth at all. They gaze
upon it with steady eyes, until they are actually looking through it,
and discovering the radiance of heaven there, and the sublime brightness
of the Eternal Life. The pagan virtues, such as justice and temperance,
are painfully reasonable and often sad. The Christian virtues are faith,
hope, and charity--each more unreasonable than the last, from the point
of view of mere mundane common sense; but they are gay as childhood, and
hold the secret of perennial youth and unfading beauty, in a world which
upon any other terms than these is hastening to decay.

LECTURE X

THE HOUND OF HEAVEN

In bringing to a close these studies of the long battle between paganism
and idealism,--between the life which is lived under the attraction of
this w