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At the place where the roads meet there is no doubt of the convergence. A man may think all sorts of things, most of them honest and many of them true, about the right way to turn in the maze at Hampton Court. But he does not think he is in the center; he knows."

So wrote media star, mystery writer, and amateur theologian G.K. Chesterton in The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic. In the years leading up to this statement, though, he doubted whether roads met or even existed, and he was not at all sure what lay at the center of his life's maze. The story of his twisting, halting search for that place where truth makes sense is in many ways the story of his life.

Chesterton's spiritual search began with his family's Liberalism. His parents were religious enough to have him baptized by the Church of England in 1874, but they otherwise had little use for traditional Christianity. If anything, they leaned toward Unitarianism.

"My own father and uncles," Chesterton wrote in his Autobiography, "were entirely of the period that believed in progress, and generally in new things, all the more because they were finding it increasingly difficult to believe in old things; and in some cases in anything at all."

Chesterton described the cultural atmosphere of his youth as distinctly post-Christian. There was "nothing new or odd about not having a religion. … We might almost say that agnosticism was an established church."

In his youth, Chesterton expressed some curiosity about orthodox Christianity (though he disliked Roman Catholicism) and twinges of anxiety about Liberalism. These explorations soon stalled. His earliest writings extolled the French Revolution, condemned dogma, and preached the exaltation of humanity.

All of this changed, however, at the Slade School of Art.

Chesterton enrolled at the Slade School in late 1892, and over the next year he went through a nihilistic phase. He called this episode "my period of madness." Friends also feared for his sanity.

The fashion of the day was Impressionism, which celebrated the artist's perspective while downplaying physical reality. "Its principal," Chesterton wrote, "was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow."

Seized by this mentality, he began to doubt the world around him. "It was as if I had myself projected the universe from within, with its trees and stars; and that is so near to the notion of being God that it is manifestly even nearer to going mad. Yet I was not mad, in any medical or physical sense; I was simply carrying the scepticism of my time as far as it would go."

Chiefly by reading authors who affirmed existence and its basic goodness (particularly Robert Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Walt Whitman), Chesterton emerged from the depths of depression by late 1893 or early 1894. He began to cultivate gratitude for life and wide-eyed wonder at the world—ideas so counter-cultural at the time, they seemed almost radical.

He took these insights with him as he left the Slade School in 1895 and began a career in publishing. He headed to London's journalistic hub, Fleet Street, and spent the next several years honing his ideas before a large and varied readership.

Much of Chesterton's intellectual development can be traced in his weekly columns for the mass-market Daily News between 1901 and 1913. To grab readers in a highly competitive market, the traditionally Nonconformist (low-church Protestant) paper assembled several strong writers and gave them broad leeway to comment on society, ideas, and world events. Chesterton became one of the publication's stars, aiding a rise in circulation from 56,000 in 1900 to 400,000 in 1909.

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