The book we are discussing is: Heretics Please read the Chapters 19 and 20.

Click here for Chapters 19: Slum Novelists and the Slums

Click here for Chapter 20: Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy

Click here for the Father Brown story: The Worst Crime in the World.

The Complete Father Brown stories can be found here: Father Brown Stories

From sac.chesterton@gmail.com email message:

With these two essays from Heretics we will be wrapping that book up. Hopefully we are learning how to read GKC better as we go along. He has written about just about everything at one time or another, but he seems to see it all through the lens of his philosophy. We saw that philosophy pretty fully and, for Chesterton, systematically in Orthodoxy. In that book he showed us his journey from unbelief to faith in Christ through the process of developing his own philosophy. “I did try to found a heresy of my own,” he said, “and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.” Chesterton is a man that lived in a world of ideas. He brings all new ideas into subjection to orthodoxy. In doing that certain themes come up again and again. Hopefully we are beginning to recognize some of those themes and their importance.

Beginning in our January meeting we will be reading and discussing The Everlasting Man. I have looked on the internet and I have found precious few online versions of The Everlasting Man, even though the work is in the public domain. I have found a PDF version, and online HTML version and even a free audio version. But if you have a Kindle or other digital reader, e.g., Beeline Reader (Susie!), I have not found a free online copy to download. You can of course purchase one from any online bookstore. So, if you want a digital copy now is the time to make some decisions. Of course there is always the old fashioned dependable hard copy – the printed and bound book! There are things I like about ebooks, but I am more comfortable with a physical book.

I hope you all enjoy your reading this month, and I’ll see you the 15th,

Yours,

Spencer

“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.”
-G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy, Introduction in Defense of Everything Else