Chesterton was, however, in agreement with the ordinary citizen and in disagreement with Shaw as to much of Shaw's essential teaching. And here we touch a matter so involved that even today it is hard to disentangle it completely. I suppose it will always be possible for two observers to look at human beings acting, to hear them talking, and to arrive at two entirely different interpretations of what they mean. This is certainly the case with any very recent period, and perhaps especially with our own recent history. We have within living memory ended a period and begun an exceedingly different period, and we tend to judge the former by the light--or the darkness--of the latter. The Victorian age, even in its extreme old age, was still tacitly assuming and legally enforcing as axioms the Christian moral system, especially in regard to marriage and all sex questions, and the sacred nature of property. To read many disquisitions on that period today one would suppose that no one living really believed in these things: that humbug explained the first and greed the second.
This is surely a false perspective. The age was an enormously conventional one: these fundamental ideas had become fossilized and meaningless for an increasing number of younger people. But when Bernard Shaw called himself an atheist out of a kind of insane generosity towards Bradlaugh (see his letter to G.K. later in this chapter) or described all property as theft, it was a real moral indignation that was roused in many minds. Real, but exceedingly confused. It testified to the need of the ordinary man to live by a creed that he need not question. Shaw and Chesterton were philosophers, and philosophers love asking questions as well as answering them. But the average man wants to live by his creed, not question it, and the elder Victorians had still some kind of creed.
There were many who believed in God. There were others who believed that the Christian moral system must remain, because it had commended itself to man's nature as the highest and best and was the true fruit of evolutionary progress. There were certainly some who were angry because they thought chaos must follow any tampering with the existing social order. But if you take the mass of those who tried to laugh Bernard Shaw aside and grew angry when they could not do so, you find at the root of the anger an intense dislike of having any part of a system questioned which was to them unquestionable, which they had erected into a creed. They thought Shaw's ideas dangerous and wanted to keep them from the young. They did not want anyone to ask how a civilisation had laid its principles open to this brilliant and effective siege. They hated Shaw's questions before they began to hate his answers. And that is probably why so many linked Chesterton with Shaw--he gave different answers, but he was asking many of the same questions. He questioned everything as Shaw did--only he pushed his questions further: they were deeper and more searching. Shaw would not accept the old Scriptural orthodoxy; G.K. refused to accept the new Agnostic orthodoxy; neither man would accept the orthodoxy of the scientists; both were prepared to attack what Butler had called "the science ridden, art ridden, culture ridden, afternoon-tea ridden cliffs of old England."