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The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic

G. K. Chesterton

Thirty-four essays on the Catholic Church and its critics, in Chesterton's most direct defence of the faith after his reception into it. The 'thing' is the Church itself. Among them: 'Why I Am a Catholic', 'Is Humanism a Religion?', 'The Drift from Domesticity', 'The Mask of the Agnostic' and 'The Spirit of Christmas'. The text is the American edition (Dodd, Mead, 1930), which carries the English edition's essays under the title The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic.

Contents

Source: Introduction and 34 essays. The OCR text in sources/en-US-originals/ is raw; for the chapter files the running heads and page numbers were removed, line-end hyphenation resolved, paragraphs broken by page heads rejoined, and obvious OCR faults corrected (the garbled small-capital openings of the essays (for example 'Tue' for 'The'), the mediaeval ligature, stray marks), one line restored from the independent 1946 reprint scan (in.ernet.dli.2015.475818). Not proofread against the page images. Two footnotes (The Forum) are kept as footnotes; the OCR does not carry italics, so none are marked.