that had been
silent so many centuries was heard in Phoenix Park at the
Consecration of the Mass: it was stretched over the earth as the
people of the earth gathered into one place which had become for the
time Rome or the Christian Centre.

During the Congress an Eastern priest accosted G.K. with praise of
his writings. His own mind full of the great ideas of Christendom and
the Faith, he felt a huge disproportion in the allusion to himself.
And when later the priest asked to be photographed at his side it
flashed through G.K.'s mind that he had heard in the East that an
idiot was supposed to bring luck. This sort of humorous yet sincere
intellectual humility startles us in the same kind of way as does the
spiritual humility of the saints. We have to accept it in the same
kind of way--without in the least understanding it, but simply
because we cannot fail to see it.

But the world could fail even to see it. It could and did fail in
imagining a mind so absorbed in the contemplation of Infinite
Greatness that its own pin-point littleness became an axiom: rather
it seemed an affectation--none the less an affectation and much the
less pardonable because the laughter was directed against others as
well as against himself.

There is an old mediaeval story of a tumbler who, converted and
become a monk, found himself inapt at the offices of Choir and
Scriptorium so he went before a statue of Our Lady and there played
all his tricks. Quite exhausted at last he looked up at the statue
and said, "Lady, this is a choice performance." There is more than a
touch of Our Lady's tumbler in Gilbert. He knew he could give in his
own fashion a choice performance, but meeting a priest come from a
far land where he had reconciled a hitherto schismatic group with the
great body of the Catholic Church, who could forgive sins and offer
the Holy Sacrifice, he truly felt "something disproportionate in
finding one's own trivial trade, or tricks of the trade, amid the
far-reaching revelations of such a trysting-place of all the tribes
of men."*

[* _Christendom in Dublin_, p. 35.]

His awe and reverence for priests was, says Father Rice, enormous.
"He would carefully weigh their opinion however fatuous." His comment
on the bad statues and fripperies which so many Catholics find a
trial was: "It shows the wisdom of the Church. The whole thing is so
terrific that if people did not have these let-downs they would go
mad."

Yet it may have