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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is Chesterton's attitude toward fairy tales?
(a) He thinks fairy tales are useful only in the nursery.
(b) He thinks fairy tales are harmful to a child's mind.
(c) He thinks fairy tales are interesting but not useful in reality.
(d) He is surer of fairy tales than of anything else in the world.

2. What does Chesterton explain as his method for proving his argument?
(a) Laying out arguments as he had thought of them, and then discovering they were already proven in Christianity.
(b) Laying out arguments with an acronym he came up with for his faith.
(c) Laying out each argument as he refuted the skeptics.
(d) Presenting each tenet of a well-reasoned case for Christianity.

3. As Chesterton explains the origin of the word, the moon is the mother of which group of people?
(a) Believers.
(b) Priests.
(c) Atheists.
(d) Lunatics.

4. According to Chesterton, what is too big an undertaking for a book even of a larger scope?
(a) Explaining the intricacies of Christianity.
(b) Proving from every angle that any one faith is true.
(c) Proving the Christianity is true.
(d) Proving that materialism is an insufficient worldview.

5. As the reader can infer from the beginning of Chapter Two, what is Hanwell?
(a) A prestigious church.
(b) An insane asylum.
(c) The author's neighborhood.
(d) A hospital.

6. How does today's skeptic compare to the skeptic of the French Revolution, according to Chesterton?
(a) Today's skeptic is not a Jacobin.
(b) Today's skeptic is not nearly so violent.
(c) Today's skeptic is a true revolutionary.
(d) Today's skeptic cannot even define what he trusts.

7. Why does Chesterton say that the Christian virtues have become crazy?
(a) They are separate from the Bible.
(b) They are isolated from all other virtues.
(c) They are not truly Christian.
(d) They are practiced in the wrong contexts.

8. As revealed in Chapter Two, what is the secret of mysticism?
(a) Mysticism provides a lens for understanding the supernatural.
(b) A man can understand life through things he does not understand.
(c) A man can try to understand life through the supernatural.
(d) Mysticism leads to God, who has the answers.

9. What thing does Chesterton despise more than anything else?
(a) Pure sophistry.
(b) The creativity of desperation.
(c) A blatant lie.
(d) An illogical argument.

10. What does Chesterton say concerning the boundaries of the will?
(a) The will has boundaries only if it is not a free action.
(b) The will frees a man.
(c) The will defines a man's actions fully.
(d) The will is limiting to the man.

11. What does Bernard Shaw assert about the idea of choice?
(a) Choice has replaced free will as the standard of desire in a man's life.
(b) Choice has replaced happiness as the standard of desire in a man's life.
(c) Choice has little effect in a man's philosophical thinking.
(d) Choice was an effective contrivance in past ages but not in the modern age.

12. What document does Chesterton refer to by the word "orthodoxy"?
(a) The Nicene Creed.
(b) The Apostles' Creed.
(c) The Disciples' Creed.
(d) The Athanasian Creed.

13. What is Chesterton's amazement at scientific advancement?
(a) That people accept scientific theories without testing them for truth.
(b) That anyone has been smart enough to understand the physical world.
(c) That one unknown thing following another unknown thing adds up to an understandable phenomenon.
(d) That science has no relation to the world of fairytales.

14. According to Chesterton, who is the only person to whom a modern realistic novel would not be boring?
(a) A baby.
(b) A child of ten.
(c) A writer of fairytales.
(d) A scientist.

15. What does Chesterton say is losing its authority in the modern mind?
(a) Argumentation.
(b) Religion.
(c) Scientific absolutes.
(d) First principles.

Short Answer Questions

1. "[T]he happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do." (Chesterton 2000, pg 215) What is Chesterton's opinion of this condition for happiness?

2. How does the book look in relation to Chesterton, according to the author himself?

3. According to Chesterton at the beginning of the first chapter, why did he write the book?

4. According to Chesterton, what effect does the moralists' attitude have on the cosmos?

5. What does Chesterton assume as common ground between him and any reader?

(see the answer keys)

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