In her admirable biography, Gilbert, Keith Chesterton, Maisie Ward dwelt at some length on a notable controversy in which her hero was engaged at the beginning of the present century. ‘He was still’, she says, ‘writing every Saturday in the Daily News. Publishers were disputing for each of his books. Yet he rushed into every religious controversy that was going on, because thereby he could clarify and develop his ideas. The most important of all these was the controversy with Blatchford, Editor of The Clarion, who had written a rationalist Credo, entitled God and My Neighbour. In 1903-4, he had the generosity and the wisdom to throw open The Clarion to the freest possible discussion of his views. The Christian attack was made by a group of which Chesterton was the outstanding figure, and was afterwards gathered into a paper volume called The Doubts of Democracy’.

The writer of the present article read these sections of Miss Ward’s book with special interest, for he remembers vividly the controversy to which they refer, and thinks it may be useful to describe it in some detail, as it has lessons for our own times. He has also another reason for recalling it.

At the end of the nineteenth and during the early years of the present century (in fact, up to the outbreak of the 1914-18 war), debates on religion held a high place in the attention of the reading part of our people.