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  "id": "CH07.P015",
  "oid": 171,
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  "work": "orthodoxy",
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  "work_metadata": {
    "title": "Orthodoxy",
    "authors": [
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    "description": "G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (1908), his account of how he came to Christian belief: the full text with annotations, cited sources and commentary.",
    "original_publication_year": 1908,
    "alternate_titles": [],
    "subjects": [
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      "English literature, 20th century"
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  "text": "Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the innovator as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish the king's orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish the king to be promptly executed. The guillotine has many sins, but to do it justice there is nothing evolutionary about it. The favourite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in the axe. The Evolutionist says, \"Where do you draw the line?\" the Revolutionist answers, \"I draw it _here_: exactly between your head and body.\" There must at any given moment be an abstract right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something eternal if there is to be anything sudden. Therefore for all intelligible human purposes, for altering things or for keeping things as they are, for founding a system for ever, as in China, or for altering it every month as in the early French Revolution, it is equally necessary that the vision should be a fixed vision. This is our first requirement.",
  "length_cp": 992,
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      "title": "Revolutionary rights above a revisable constitution",
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          "exact": "for altering it every month as in the early French Revolution",
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          "prefix": "ystem for ever, as in China, or ",
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            "approach": "Interlocutors and historical debates",
            "question": "How did French revolutionary declarations combine permanent rights with changing political institutions?"
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      "title": "A fixed ideal and the permanent work of reform",
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