SOURCE: "Detectives and Apocalypses," in G. K. Chesterton, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1974, pp. 120-44.

In the following excerpt, Clipper highlights the religious themes of The Man Who Was Thursday.

If one wishes to date the beginning of Chesterton's commitment to religion as an answer to the problems of modern man, it is safe to point to 1908, the year of both Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday. In a later essay, he said that the novel was written "in the middle of a thick London fog of positive pessimism and materialism," and the dedication to E. C. Bentley speaks of that era when

A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
 Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.

The subtitle A Nightmare, underscores one of its features (and also relates it to almost all his other romances). In the...