y one of the fads from
Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and
tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure;
and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the
ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth
reeling but erect.*

[* _Orthodoxy_, Chapter VI, pp. 182-5.]

No quotation can adequately convey the wealth of thought in the book.
Yet amazingly, the _Times_ reviewer rebuked G.K. for substituting
emotion for intellect, partly on the strength of a sentence in the
chapter called "The Maniac." "The madman is the man who has lost
everything except his reason." The reviews, when one reads them as a
whole, exactly confirm what Wilfrid Ward said in the _Dublin Review:_
that whereas he had regarded _Orthodoxy_ as a triumphant vindication
of his own view that G.K. was a really profound thinker, he found to
his amazement that those who had thought him superficial, hailed it
as a proof of theirs.

Obviously with a man so much concerned with ultimates the place
accorded him in letters will depend upon whether one agrees or
disagrees with his conclusions. In a country that is not Catholic
this consideration must affect the standing of any Catholic thinker.
Thus Newman was considered by Carlyle to have "the brain of a
moderate sized rabbit," yet by others his is counted the greatest
mind of the century. Similarly Arnold Bennett could credit Chesterton
with only a second-class intellectual apparatus--because he was a
dogmatist. To this Chesterton replied (in _Fancies versus Facts_):
"In truth there are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas
and know it and those who accept dogmas and don't know it. My only
advantage over the gifted novelist lies in my belonging to the former
class." If one grasps the Catholic view of dogma the answer is
satisfying; if not the objector is left with his original
objection--as against Chesterton, as against Newman. And Chesterton
had the extra disadvantage of being a journalist famous for his jokes
now moving in Newman's unquestioned field of philosophy and theology.
It was in part the difficulty of convincing a man against his will.
These critics, as Wilfrid Ward pointed out, read superficially and
looked only at the fooling, the fantastic puns and comparisons,
ignoring the underlying deep seriousness and lines of thought that
made him, as it then seemed boldly, rank Chesterton with such