s.*

[* Ibid., pp. 176-77.]

Yet, for the Christian, hope remains: no murder can be the end.
"Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God
who knew the way out of the grave." This quotation is from the
chapter called "Five Deaths of the Faith" in _The Everlasting Man_.
Several times in the book Chesterton puts aside tempting lines of
thought with the remark that he intends to develop them later--in one
of the unwritten books that he always felt were so much better than
those he actually wrote. Would any human life have been long enough
to develop them all? Anyhow, even the whole of this life was not
available.

As I turn to the story of the weekly paper rising again from its
ashes I ask myself the question I have often asked: was it worth
while? I cannot answer the question. Something of his manhood seemed
to Gilbert bound up with this struggle, and it may be he would have
been a lesser man had he abandoned it. And yet at moments imagining
the poetry, the philosophy that might have been ours--another _White
Horse_, another _Everlasting Man_--I am tempted to wish that these
years had not thus been sacrificed to the paper which enshrined his
brother's memory.

CHAPTER XXV

The Reluctant Editor (1925-1930)

_I tell you naught for your comfort
Yea naught for your desire
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

Ballad of the White Horse_

COULD GILBERT HAVE divided his life between literary work, his home
at Top Meadow, and those other elements called in the _Autobiography_
"Friendship and Foolery," that life might well have been as he
himself called it "indefensibly fortunate and happy." But he could
not. Part of his philosophy of joy was that thanks must be given--for
sunsets, for dandelions, for beech trees, for home and friends. And
this thanks could only be the taking of his part in the fight. He
would never, he once said, have turned of his own accord to politics:
it is arguable that it would have been better if he never had. But
his brother had plunged into the fray with that very political paper
the _New Witness_ and his brother's death had left it in Gilbert's
hands. He felt the task to be a sacred legacy, and when the paper
died for lack of funds his one thought was how to start it again.

For many months he kept the office in being and paid salaries to a
skeleton staff, consisting of Mr. Gander, the deaf old manager, Miss
Dunham (now Mrs. Phillips)