Chesterton’s preference for paradox was never hospitable to platitudes. “Familiarity breeds not contempt, but indifference,” Jackson suggests. Chesterton adds: “But it can breed surprise. Try saying ‘Boots’ ninety times.” He is ready, though, to applaud Jackson if he finds something strikingly true. Under Jackson’s remark, “There is nothing old under the sun,” he is content to write, “Very good.”
Chesterton does not share Jackson’s amorphous idea of belief. “No two men have exactly the same religion,” Jackson writes, “a church, like society, is a compromise.” Chesterton’s reply is: “The same religion has the two men. The sun shines on the evil and the good. But the sun does not compromise.”
Chesterton becomes most exasperated when Jackson expresses the conventionally pessimistic social Darwinism in which his thought had developed. It is not a profanity that he employs when he responds to Jackson’s remark, “The most hopeful sign of the present age is the decline of the birth rate,” by writing underneath: “Christ! What an age!” Read it all.