Orthodoxy

G. K. Chesterton

This book is meant to be a companion to "Heretics," and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer's own solitary and sincere speculations and then with the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But if it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.

Table of contents

• Titlepage
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• I: Introduction in Defence of Everything Else
• II: The Maniac
• III: The Suicide of Thought
• IV: The Ethics of Elfland
• V: The Flag of the World
• VI: The Paradoxes of Christianity
• VII: The Eternal Revolution
• VIII: The Romance of Orthodoxy
• IX: Authority and the Adventurer