G.K. CHESTERTON.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3241, 10 June 1911, Page 9

G.K. CHESTERTON.

.. mm. HOW HE BECAME A CHRISTIAN. Mr. G. K.. Chesterton explains how he became a Christian All I had hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it. I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen; and I cannot understand anyone passing tlie age of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a question. I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity, and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity. But I certainly regarded Him as a "man ; though perhaps I thought that even on that point, He had an advantage over some of his modern critics. I read all the scientific and sceptical literature of my time—all of it, at least, that I could find written in English and lying*about; and I read nothing else—l mean I read nothing else on any other note of pholosophy. The penny dreadfuls which I also read were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity; but I did not know this at the time. I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh "who brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when -they said that Tom Paine and the freethinkers unsettled the mind.. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalist made, the question whether reason was of any use whatever ; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first 1 time) whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll’s atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke across my mind, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian,” I was in a desperate way. '