After about a year or so without delving into it, I reopened G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown Stories last week.
Still being in the first section, The Innocence of Father Brown, I read The Wrong Shape which is about 15 pages long. Like The Secret Garden, the villain of The Wrong Shape is a secularist who is sceptical about the supernatural realm of life. However, after Dr. Harris kills Quinton, a satirical Romantic figure fascinated by all things Indian and Oriental, because he loves Quinton's wife, he discovers that there's something beyond and high above naturalism, as he suffers the pangs of guilt and remorse. This reminded me of Dostoyevsky's celebrated exploration of the psychology of guilt and remorse in Crime and Punishment which I read more than 30 years ago.
The context of The Wrong Shape which revolves around Quinton's obsessive interest in Indian and Oriental mysticism reminds me of Chesterton's Orthodoxy, which I read about 25 years ago, as it points towards Buddhism and other forms of Eastern mysticism lacking the physical reality/substance of orthodox Christianity (i.e. the Incarnation, Trinity, Transubstantiation etc., the belief in God becoming man to remain with us in the tabernacle).
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