ne for a moment that religion is
a thing that is necessarily bound up with an organization which is
mainly political; he is not so credulous as to believe that the
spiritual can fall vertically to earth because a man kneels before a
bishop and becomes a priest. Rather he had a much better plan. He
started by being an atheist, the best possible foundation for subsequent
theism. From this he became an Immanist, which is that God is in some
way dispersed throughout the earth.

If there is one thing upon which we may say that Shaw and Chesterton are
identical, it is in the strange fact that neither of them has, I think,
ever described an ordinary lover--the sort of person who is nothing of a
biological surprise, the kind of person who woos on a suburban court in
Surbiton or Wimbledon and marries in a hideous red brick church to the
cheerful accompaniment of confetti and the Wedding March. I do not think
either of them can really enter into the ordinary emotions of life. They
could neither of them write, I fancy, a really typical novel--that is, a
tale about the folks who do the conventional things. Chesterton always
sees everything upside down. If the man on Notting Hill sees it as a
bustling area, Chesterton sees it as a place upon which a Napoleon might
fall. Shaw, on the other hand, could not write of ordinary things
because he is usually contemptuous of them. If Chesterton thinks
education is a failure it is because the conventional method irritates
him; Shaw considers that education does not educate a man, it 'merely
moulds him.'

I am not sure that Mr. Skimpole, in his brilliant study of Bernard Shaw,
is quite correct when he says 'the whole case against Chesterton, of
course, is that he is a Romantic.' Why is it a something against him
that he chooses to be an idealist? Because, says Mr. Skimpole, 'he does
not seem to have grasped the fact that the most important difference
between the Real and the Ideal aspects of anything is that while the
Ideal is permanent and unchangeable as an angel, the Real requires an
everlasting circle of changes.' I am rather afraid Mr. Skimpole is
talking through a certain covering that adorns his head. Cannot he see
that very often the ideal is nothing less than the real? It is no case
against Chesterton that he is a Romantic so long as the fact is duly
recognized. If he considers certain institutions are permanent which may
be said to be ideal (for instance, that marriage is a sacramen