The One, True Sanity

What first attracted G.K. Chesterton to Christian orthodoxy, he remarked, was that “it was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.” Fellow skeptics found the monks too meek and the Crusaders too bloody, the vestments too showy and the sackcloth too threadbare, the membership too common and the theology too exclusive. They faulted it for being too optimistic about the universe and too pessimistic about the world; for repressing sexuality too much and (according to the Malthusians) not enough. Yet the common man embraced Christianity. “Perhaps,” Chesterton concluded, “this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the center. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad--in various ways.”