we know Him:
Gilbert answered that question when by praise and thanksgiving he
came as a boy to the discovery of God, beginning by a passionate
desire to thank someone for the Universe. There is much praise in the
Collected Poems. There is the note of hope in an almost hopeless
fight in _The Ballad of the White Horse_. There are lovely poems to
his wife. Since Browning none has understood the Sacrament of
Marriage as well as Gilbert Chesterton.

In 1927 there also appeared, beside a couple of pamphlets:

The Return of Don Quixote
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Secret of Father Brown
The Judgment of Dr. Johnson

_Robert Louis Stevenson_ took Gilbert back to his boyhood and is by
general agreement among the best of his literary studies. But the
best thing he ever said apropos of Stevenson came not in this book
but in his attack on the "science" of eugenics:

Keats died young; but he had more pleasure in a minute than a
Eugenist gets in a month. Stevenson had lung trouble; and it may, for
all I know, have been perceptible to the Eugenic eye even a
generation before. But who would perform that illegal operation: the
stopping of Stevenson? Intercepting a letter bursting with good news,
confiscating a hamper full of presents and prizes, pouring torrents
of intoxicating wine into the sea, all this is a faint approximation
for the Eugenic inaction of the ancestors of Stevenson. This,
however, is not the essential point; with Stevenson it is not merely
a case of the pleasure we get, but of the pleasure he got. If he had
died without writing a line, he would have had more red-hot joy than
is given to most men. Shall I say of him, to whom I owe so much, let
the day perish wherein he was born? Shall I pray that the stars of
the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among the days of
the year, because it shut not up the days of his mother's womb? I
respectfully decline; like Job, I will put my hand upon my mouth.*

[* _Eugenics and Other Evils,_ p. 57.]

When the _Stevenson_ itself appeared, Sir Edmund Gosse wrote:

I have just finished reading the book in which you smite the
detractors of R.L.S. hip and thigh. I cannot express without a sort
of hyperbole the sentiments which you have awakened; of joy, of
satisfaction, of relief, of malicious and vindictive pleasure. We are
avenged at last. . . .

It is and always since his death has been impossible f