We will continue our reading with the next two chapters of Chesterton’s Autobiography:

Chapter 7 – The Crime of Orthodoxy
Chapter 8 – Figures in Fleet Street

The first chapter (Chapter 7) gives his humorous and rather rambling account , I could just say a Chestertonian account, of how he came to seriously consider Christianity as the moral and philosophical framework he had been seeking for; or rather, as he says in Orthodoxy, after putting the finishing touches on the “heresy” (his word) of his own that he was constructing, he discovered that it was orthodoxy. He gives us something of an account of befriending a group of Anglo-Catholics and becoming an Anglo-Catholic himself. He also gives an account of the writing of his book Orthodoxy. There are a lot of good passages in this chapter, interspersed with passages of meeting people we have never heard of. But all in all there are lots of his reflections, philosophical and psychological, about becoming a Christian.

The second chapter (Chapter 8) is a more straightforward account of his life as a journalist for the London newspapers and the people he met associated with that line of work. Fleet Street, if you didn’t know already, is the location of the offices of the London newspapers and is used as a synonym for British journalism. It’s a much shorter chapter, full of interesting tidbits and people, but not as rich as the first chapter we will read this month.

And if you’ve been reading The Club of Queer Trades, let’s conclude the book with the last story, Chapter 6 – The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady.

And just for fun here’s a audio recording of Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit, by P. G. Wodehouse. This one will have to do, as I couldn’t find a story with a Lenten motif.

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
– G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man