now such Truths and feed upon such
Food can yet appear so dull and lifeless. Anyhow, whether the fault
lie in part with us or entirely with the world at large, certain it
is that in that world a convert is always expected to justify not
merely his beliefs but his sincerity in continuing to hold them. I
wonder if the Pharisees said of St. Paul that they were sure he
really wanted to return to his old allegiance as some said it of
Newman, or spoke as Arnold Bennett did when he accused Chesterton of
being Modernist in his secret thoughts? Were St. Paul's epistles an
Apologia pro Vita Sua?

An Apologia does not of course mean an apology but a justification,
and the ground on which justification was sometimes demanded amused
Gilbert rather than annoying him. Playing the Parlour Game which
consists of guessing at what point in an article on hydraulics,
elegiacs or neo-Platonism Dean Inge will burst into his daily attack
on the Church, he wrote:

The Dean of St. Paul's got to business, in a paragraph in the
second half of his article, in which he unveiled to his readers all
the horrors of a quotation from Newman; a very shocking and shameful
passage in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his
religion, and in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that
he likes to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and
beloved, that there is a sense of being protected by prayers,
sacramentals and so on; and that happiness of this sort satisfies the
soul. The Dean, having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the
Cardinal's spiritual condition, drops the curtain with a groan and
says it is Paganism. How different from the Christian orthodoxy of
Plotinus!*

[* _The Thing_, pp. 156-7.]

This playful, not to say frivolous, tone was fresh cause of annoyance
to those who were apt to be annoyed. It is easier to understand their
objection than the opposite one: that he became dull and prosy after
he joined the Church (or alternatively after he left Fleet Street for
Beaconsfield). The only real difficulty about his later work arises
from the riot of his high spirits. In his own style I must say there
are moments when even I want to read the Riot Act. And those who
admire him less feel this more keenly. Bad puns, they say, wild and
sometimes ill-mannered jokes are perhaps pardonable in youth but in
middle age they are inexcusable. The complainants against _The Thing_
are in s