d not merely use laughter as a weapon: he was
often simply amused--and did not conceal it. He told Desmond Gleeson
that he remembered reading Renan's Christ "while I was standing in
the queue waiting to see 'Charley's Aunt.' But it is obvious which is
the better farce for 'Charley's Aunt' is still running." No wonder
that Eileen Duggan when she pictured him as a modern St. George saw
him "shouting gleefully 'Bring on your dragons.'" Even dragons may be
bothered by the unexpected. And it may well be that when the rapier
of anger has been blunted against the armour of some accustomed
fighter he will be driven off the field by gales of Chestertonian
laughter.

CHAPTER XXX

Our Lady's Tumbler

_I hate to be influenced. I like to be commanded or to be free. In
both of these my own soul can take a clear and conscious part: for
when I am free it must be for something that I really like, and not
something that I am persuaded to pretend to like: and when I am
commanded, it must be by something I know, like the Ten Commandments.
But the thing called Pressure, of which the polite name is
Persuasion, I always feel to be a hidden enemy. It is all a part of
that worship of formlessness, and flowing tendencies, which is really
the drift of cosmos back into chaos. I remember how I suddenly
recoiled in youth from the influence of Matthew Arnold (who said many
things very well worth saying) when he told me that God was "a stream
of tendency." Since then I have hated tendencies: and liked to know
where I was going and go there--or refuse_.

_G.K.'s Weekly_, Aug. 18, 1928.

IN 1932, WHEN Gilbert had been in the Church just ten years and
Frances six, my husband and I met them at the Eucharistic Congress in
Dublin. They were staying at the Vice-Regal Lodge and were very happy
in that gathering of the Catholic world brought about by the
Congress. It was this thought of the potential of the faith for a
unity the League of Nations could not achieve--only dogma is strong
enough to unite mankind--that gave its title to the book _Christendom
in Dublin_.

In the crowd that thronged to that great gathering he saw Democracy.
Its orderliness was more than a mere organisation: it was
Self-determination of the People. "A whole mob, what many would call
a whole rabble, was doing exactly what it wanted; and what it wanted
was to be Christian." The mind of that crowd was stretched over the
centuries as the faint sound of St. Patrick's bell