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.