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Page 5
For if this book is a joke it is a joke against me.
I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been
discovered before. If there is an element of farce in what follows,
the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I
was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last.
It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious.
No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself;
no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him:
I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from
my throne. I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end
of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys,
try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten
minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen
hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully
juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished
in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths:
but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that
they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really
in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.
It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original;
but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy
of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from
the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was
the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own;
and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it
was orthodoxy.
It may be that somebody will be entertained by the account
of this happy fiasco. It might amuse a friend or an enemy to
read how I gradually learnt from the truth of some stray legend
or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy, things that I
might have learnt from my catechism--if I had ever learnt it.
There may or may not be some entertainment in reading how I
found at last in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I
might have found in the nearest parish church. If any one is
entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the
phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains
of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain
conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book.
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour.
I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
I add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note
naturally should, at the beginning of the book. These essays are
concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian
theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the
best root of energy and sound ethics. They are not intended
to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question
of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation
of that creed. When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means
the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself
Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic
conduct of those who held such a creed. I have been forced by
mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed;
I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians,
of where we ourselves got it. This is not an ecclesiastical treatise
but a sort of slovenly autobiography. But if any one wants my
opinions about the actual nature of the authority, Mr. G.S.Street
has only to throw me another challenge, and I will write him another book.
II THE MANIAC
Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world;
they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.
Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made
a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a
motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often,
and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher
said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself."
And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught
an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell." I said to him,
"Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?
For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more
colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed
star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of
the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in
lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after
all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums.
"Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them.
That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy,
he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from
whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.
If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly
individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself
is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't
act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would
be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he
believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin;
complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's
self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in
Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has `Hanwell' written on his
face as plain as it is written on that omnibus." And to all this
my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply,
"Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?"
After a long pause I replied, "I will go home and write a book in answer
to that question." This is the book that I have written in answer
to it.
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