SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN:

The aging Chesterton, recalling Thursday in the light of the darkness of his youth across the span of forty years, makes the perilous mistake of seeing the dragon of decadence and not the knight in shining orthodoxy who slays it. Thus in his autobiography he writes that "the monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in the story... is not so much God... but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism," whereas, in fact, as the text testifies explicitly, Sunday refers to himself within the context of the Book of Genesis and the Days of Creation as "the Sabbath" and "the peace of God," and, as if to hammer the point home, his final words are those of Christ Himself, asking his interlocutors, "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?" Pace Chesterton, whose myopic memory misreads his own novel, Sunday reveals himself as being much more than mere Nature, much more than a mere god, but the Christian God whose presence makes sense of the nightmare nonsense that His perceived absence presents.

Seeing Thursday in the contemporaneous light of Orthodoxy and its "ethics of elfland," we can see that it encapsulates the paradox, embodied in the character of Chesterton's delightful priest detective Father Brown, that wisdom can only be found in innocence. This is nothing less than the truth that Christ teaches. We will not be with Him in heaven unless we become as little children.

The paradoxical heart of The Man Who Was Thursday is the tension that exists between the childlikeness demanded by Christ and the childishness that St. Paul tells us to avoid. We have to remain child-like by ceasing to be childish. The first is the wisdom of innocence, or the sanity of sanctity, whereby we see the miracle of life with eyes full of wonder; the second is the self-centredness of one who refuses the challenge of growing-up. Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday is essentially about childish detectives attaining childlike wisdom, just as his later novel, Manalive, illustrates how the pure childlikeness of the aptly-named Innocent Smith is misunderstood by the childish world in which he finds himself.

The Man Who Was Thursday shows us the paradoxical truth that it takes a big man to know how small he is. It shows us that thinking we are big is childish whilst knowing that we are small is childlike. Thinking we are big, the sin of pride, turns our world into a living nightmare. Knowing we are small wakes us up. In a world that is somnambulating deeper and deeper into the living nightmare it has made for itself, we are in more need than ever of the wide-awake awareness of G.K. Chesterton, a visionary who was larger than life because he spent his life on his knees.

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