Hmmm. I'm not at all sure whether William Cobbet is the best introduction to Chesterton. Haven't read it, but it looks like it is probably motivated by the least important aspect of Chesterton's writings - politics.
My recommendations would be to start with quotations at and to go on to Heretics, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. (Gotta remember that it was The Everlasting Man that put Lewis on his path to faith)
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/%7Emward/gkc/books/index.html
I would agree that Lewis saw paganism as superior to atheism, but he didn't see it as the truth - only a pale reflection of the truth, and as a possible door to Christianity.
Your comments on the individualist imperative are interesting. (I think of it more as "the cult of the individual" myself.) I I don't see that many people that think about the topic. My earlier comments were meant to stress that feminism, by and large, places the demands of the individual above any teaching that along with our gender, we may have roles as well, and generally opposes, sometimes fanatically, any suggestion of gender roles, and that the "Me and what I want first" attitude is opposed to Christianity. If all people were saying, "What is your will, Lord?" rather than, "Lord, this is my will - please let me have my way..." there would be no conflicts, even if it required us to stand on our heads during daily prayers.
Restated, the will of the individual is the opposite of "Let Thy will be done." If, for another example, God wants me to get sent to prison (to engage in some form of ministry there, for example), my will would oppose that and my Christian duty would be to suppress my own will. In that case I would not see God's purpose, only my own purposes. So in the case of the apostle Paul telling us to love our wives, when I get the real meaning of that I find it is something I very often don't want to do, and that love means making myself do it, in humility, and not 'holding a list on her' (as Californians tend to say). For a wife, that 'awful' word submit quite probably often brings similar reactions. Pluralistic feminist thought* rejects this (although it is less often now recognized as being feminist origin, or that feminism itself developed as a logical extension of pluralism).
In the example cited above, Lucy did not follow her own will. Edmund did.
Again, I have been speaking only about genuine love for others, not twisted versions of it. That is by no means an individual/collective paradigm. It is just as individual, and the 'love' (as miss fussbudget sees it) is directed toward self. She's not really being collective.
I believe the reference was that Mark and Jane had either used contraception** to avoid children or maybe even had an abortion, not merely that she 'failed to have' a child.
*This application of feminism or liberal thought should not be confused with the natural desires of people to engage in activities of interest to them. Conservative (orthodox) Christian thought should not be taken as trying to dominate or control every aspect of people's lives, for example, saying that girl's should not engage in sports, women should stay at home, men should never never cry or other extremist (to me, whacko) thinking. It is rather the light in which our human activities are seen.
(Just trying to head off people who would interpret my words as seeking to control the decisions and desires of women - there are so many areas where we really are free to choose and so few strictures that God places on us, in the end!)
**This is a thorny one, but if a prime purpose of marriage is to produce children, then deliberately refusing to do so because of self-ish desires (we just want it to be 'the two of us') would be short-circuiting what God intended for us. But I'm not saying anything dogmatic about contraception here. That depends so much on specific personal situations.
Abortion, being murder, is another kettle of fish. (You may disagree with that, but I will take a dogmatic stand on that one.)
