And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
—Genesis

The ordinary modern progressive position is that this is a bad universe, but will certainly get better. I say it is certainly a good universe, even if it gets worse.
—G. K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying

In life, there was always something unwieldy about Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Mentally as well as physically, he was a man who tended to . . . overflow. Like Flambeau, the criminal mastermind of his Father Brown mysteries, Chesterton was fully six-foot-four. Vertically, he left off growing in adolescence. Horizontally, he kept going. Slender in youth, he was solid as a young man and positively rotund in his thirties. His body was the perfect correlative for the drama he enacted. Chesterton always seems to have favored pince-nez, but it was his wife, Frances, who advocated the familiar equipage that defined his public image. With billowing cape and wide-brimmed hat, brandishing a sword stick and often sporting a pistol from his pocket as he strode up and down his beloved Fleet Street, Chesterton cut a figure as imposing as one of his famous epigrams.

The impression of superabundance continued on the page. His prose bristles with encompassing vitality. No matter the ostensible subject, Chesterton was always present amongst the syllables with his view of the universe. T. S. Eliot said that his 1906 study of Dickens was “the best essay on that