facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept
from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered
to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the Arian
materialism by dropping a Greek Iota; she has not succumbed to Eastern
influences, which would have made her forget she was the Church on earth
as well as in heaven. With tremendous commonsense she has remained
rational and chosen the middle course, which was one of the cardinal
virtues of the ancient Greek philosophers.

The Christian religion is, then, rational because attacked along
irrational grounds; the Church is also reasonable because she has not
been swayed by the attraction of heresy nor listened to the glib
fallacies of those who always want to make her something more or
something less.

* * * * *

The other and lesser contention of the book is the wisdom of the land of
the Fairies. This is, Chesterton feels, the land where is found the
philosophy of the nursery that is expressed in fairy tales--tales that
every grown-up should read at Christmas.

Fairyland is for Chesterton the sunny land of commonsense. It is more,
it is a place that has a very definite religion; it is, in fact, really
the child's land of Christ. Take the lesson of Cinderella, says
Chesterton; it is really the teaching of the Prayer Book that the humble
shall be exalted, because humility is worthy of exaltation.

Or the Sleeping Beauty. Is it not the significance of how love can
bridge time? The prince would have been there to wake the princess had
she slept a thousand instead of a hundred years.

Yet again the land of the Fairies is the abode of reason. If Jack is the
son of a miller, then a miller is the father of Jack. It is no good in
Fairyland trying to prove that two and two do not make four, but it is
quite possible to imagine that the witch really did turn the unlucky
prince into a pig. After all, such a procedure is not a monopoly of the
fairies. Lesser persons than princes have been turned into pigs, not by
the wand of a witch, but by the wand of good or bad fortune.

* * * * *

'Orthodoxy' is probably the sanest book that Chesterton has ever
written. It is, I venture to think, the work that will gain for him
immortality. It is a book on the greatest of themes, the reasonableness
of the Christian religion. There have been many books written t