Literary giant G. K. Chesterton has long been hailed as an optimist who believed that the world favors of such an outlook on life. However, as Ralph Wood shows in this careful reading of Chestertons corpus, the grand optimist also saw the terrible and tragic side to this world and the life within it. Indeed, Chesterton understood God's incarnation in Jesus as proof of the worlds darker side. In engaging fashion Wood reveals Chesterton's further appraisal: that Christian progress and attempts at political control (and cultural triumphalism) deepen the problems and remove the risk of the Gospel. Remarkably, and in bold relief to the saccharin views of Chesterton's thought, Wood shows that atheism may well have something to teach Christianity--the terror associated with Gods own goodness. For Chesterton, the God of Christianity is different than is often supposed.