Heretics

Heretics by GK Chesterton, 305 pages

It might seem odd that Chesterton wrote Heretics before he wrote Orthodoxy, but it has been the case throughout history that right belief is usually discovered through an examination of wrong belief.  In this book Chesterton takes on all the fashionable thinkers of his own time with his customary blend of good humor, biting wit, and common sense.  Many of those thinkers are now forgotten - although there are exceptions such as Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells, and George Bernard Shaw - but their errors are more enduring than their memories.  Indeed, Chesterton even refutes errors that would not become popular until long after he was dead.

Chesterton's primary theme, threaded throughout the book, is that there is no such thing, in reality, as a materialist or a cynic - all men are ruled by ideas, and some of those ideas are wrong, and no idea is more wrong than the idea that ideas have no consequences.