t. If you think a letter to
the _Mercury_ clearing up these points would be fairer to everybody,
of course I should be delighted to write one.

This attitude of the "oldest inhabitant" was the Chestertonian
fashion of accepting the youthful demand for something new. When a
young writer in _Colosseum_ alluded to him as out of date he took it
with the utmost placidity. "Good," he said to Edward Macdonald. "I
like to see people refusing to accept the opinions of others before
they've examined them themselves. They're perfectly entitled to say
that I'm not a literary lion but a Landseer lion." Mr. Eliot's answer
was a request to Gilbert to write in the _Criterion_ and an
explanation that he had felt in a false position since he rather
liked alliteration than otherwise.

Thus too when Chesterton had answered a newspaper report of a speech
made by C. E. M. Joad, the latter complained that it was a criticism
"not of anything that I think, but of a garbled newspaper caricature
of a few of the things I think, taken out of their context and
falsified."

He added that he had not said science would destroy religion but that
at its present rate of decline the _Church of England_ would become a
dead letter in a hundred and fifty years. Next, that science "has no
bearing upon the spiritual truths of religion," but

has been presented, at any rate by the Church of England, in a
texture of obsolete ideas about the nature of the physical universe
and the behaviour of physical things which science has shown to be
untrue.

Finally that religion is vital but it is in Mysticism that the core
of religion lies for me, and mystical experience, as I understand it,
does not want organizing.

I may be wrong in all this, but I hope that this explanation, such
as it is, will lead you to think that I am not such an arrogant fool
as your article suggests.

Chesterton replied (May 4, 1930):

I hope you will forgive my delay in thanking you for your very
valuable and reasonable letter; but I have been away from home; and
for various reasons my correspondence has accumulated very heavily. I
am extremely glad to remember that, even before receiving your
letter, I was careful to say in my article that my quarrel was not
personally with you, but with the newspapers which had used what you
said as a part of a stupid stunt against organised religion. I am
even more glad to learn that they