ared he said to a friend of mine
"Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St. Thomas all my
life and I could never have written such a book." After Gilbert's
death, asked to give an appreciation, he returned to the same topic--

I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book
ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for
such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a
"clever" book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty
years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have
themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail
to perceive that the so-called "wit" of Chesterton has put their
scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which they had tried to
demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less
clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was
one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he
was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either
help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could
understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he
apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being
witty. That is all they can see of him.*

[* _Chesterton_, by Cyril Clemens, pp. 150-151.]

In joining the Church Chesterton had found like all converts, from
St. Paul to Cardinal Newman, that he had come into the land of
liberty and especially of intellectual liberty. "Conversion," he
said, "calls on a man to stretch his mind, as a man awakening from
sleep may stretch his arms and legs."*

[* _Well and Shallows_, p. 130.]

I suppose one of the reasons why the surrounding world finds it hard
to receive this statement from a convert is that he has only to look
around him to see so many Catholics wrapped in slumbers as placid as
the next man's. To this very real difficulty, and to all its
implications, Chesterton unfortunately seldom adverted. To the
scandal wrought by evil Catholics, historical or contemporary, he was
not blind--he summarised one element in the Reformation conflict:

Bad men who had no right to their right reason
Good men who had good reason to be wrong.

But I wish that with his rare insight into minds he had analysed us
average Catholics. He might have startled us awake by explaining to
non-Catholics _how_ those who k