omes down in his airship to collect the
doctors, whose bodies he drops out, a little later on. The buildings
vanish in the flames, the keepers bolt, the inmates talk about their
souls. MacIan is reunited to the lady of the Channel Island, and the
story ends.

When a stone has been tossed into a pond, the ripples gradually and
symmetrically grow smaller. A Chesterton novel is like an adventurous
voyage of discovery, which begins on smooth water and is made with the
object of finding the causes of the ripples. As ripple succeeds
ripple--or chapter follows chapter--so we have to keep a tighter hold on
such tangible things as are within our reach. Finally we reach the
centre of the excitement and are either sucked into a whirlpool, or hit
on the head with a stone. When we recover consciousness we feebly
remember we have had a thrilling journey and that we had started out
with a misapprehension of the quality of Chestertonian fiction. A man
whose memory is normal should be able to give an accurate synopsis of a
novel six months after he has read it. But I should be greatly surprised
if any reader of _The Ball and the Cross_ could tell exactly what it was
all about, within a month or two of reading it. The discontinuity of it
makes one difficulty; the substitution of paradox for incident makes
another. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conviction that this novel
will survive its day and the generation that begot it. If it was
Chesterton's endeavour (as one is bound to suspect) to show that the
triumph of atheism would lead to the triumph of a callous and inhuman
body of scientists, then he has failed miserably. But if he was
attempting to prove that the uncertainties of religion were trivial
things when compared with the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict
must be reversed. The dialogues on religion contained in _The Ball and
the Cross_ are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the
few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an
atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence.

If we consider _Manalive_ (1912) now we shall be departing from strict
chronological order, as it was preceded by _The Innocence of Father
Brown_. It will, however, be more satisfactory to take the two Father
Brown books together. In the first of these and _Manalive_, a change can
be distinctly felt. It is not a simple weakening of the power of
employing instruments, such as befell Ibsen when, after writing The La