sey will always be efficient and Father Keegan futile if
not actually silenced; and I know that an officially Catholic
Chesterton is an impossibility.

However, you must find out all this for yourself as I found it out
for myself. Mere controversy is waste of time; and faith is a curious
thing. I believe that you would not have become a professed official
Catholic if you did not believe that you believe in
transubstantiation; but I find it quite impossible to believe that
you believe in transubstantiation any more than, say, Dr. Saleeby
does. You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the
spectacle--the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil
inside wishing you had become a Fireworshipper instead of coming
there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and
yours--all incredible, monstrous, comic, though of course I can put a
perfect literary complexion on it in a brace of shakes.

Now, however, I am becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?).
Besides I am going on too long and the lunch bell is ringing. So
forgive me, and don't bother to answer unless you cannot help it.

Ever,

G. BERNARD SHAW.

Meanwhile, Shaw as usual responded cordially to Gilbert's wish to
make him an early attraction in the paper--but also as usual urged
him towards the theatre:

10th Dec. 1924.

By all means send me a screed about Joan [of Arc] for the cockpit.
But I protest I have no views about her. I am only the first man
modest enough to know his place _aupres d'elle_ as a simple reporter
and old stage hand.

You should write plays instead of editing papers. Why not do George
Fox, who was released from the prisons in which Protestant England
was doing its best to murder him, by the Catholic Charles II? George
and Joan were as like as two peas in pluck and obstinacy.

G.B.S.

The specimen advance number was published before the end of 1924. In
the leading article G.K. gave his reasons for agreeing finally to use
his own name--although in the form attacked by Shaw. He had first
viewed the proposal with a "horror which has since softened into
loathing." He had looked for a title that should indicate the paper's
policy. But while that policy was in fact a support of human
normality: well-distributed property, freedom and the family--yet the
surrounding atmosphere was so abnormal that "any title defining our