ilbert, is what I think I have already
said to you, and what I have said not long ago in a printed book.
That I was received into the Church on the Eve of Candlemass 1909,
and it is perhaps the only act in my life, which I am quite certain I
have never regretted. Every day I live, the Church seems to me more
and more wonderful; the Sacraments more and more solemn and
sustaining; the voice of the Church, her liturgy, her rules, her
discipline, her ritual, her decisions in matters of Faith and Morals
more and more excellent and profoundly wise and true and right, and
her children stamped with something that those outside Her are
without. There I have found Truth and reality and everything outside
Her is to me compared with Her as dust and shadow. Once more God
bless you and Frances. Please give her my love. In my prayers for you
I have always added her name.

Yours,

MAURICE.

It was a bit of great good fortune, although at the time he did not
feel it so, that the death of the _New Witness_ in 1922 for lack of
funds, left Gilbert some months for uninterrupted creative thought
before _G.K.'s Weekly_ took its place. Lawrence Solomon, friend of
his boyhood and at this time a near neighbour, has told me not only
how happy his conversion had made Gilbert but also how it had seemed
to bring him increased strength of character. Worry, he had told
Maurice Baring, did not worry so much as of old because of a
fundamental peace. In this atmosphere were written two of his most
important books: _St. Francis of Assisi_ published 1923, _The
Everlasting Man_ published 1925.

In a poem he has expressed his sense of conversion as a new light
that had transfigured life: indeed of a new life given to him:

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said.

* * * * *

They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.*

[* _Collected Poems_, p. 387, "The Convert."]

Both books shine with that light on the white road of man's
endeavour, thrill with that life. Gilbert felt now the clue to
history in his fingers and he used it increasingly. _The Everlasting
Man_ is the _Orthodoxy_ of h