ot get Freedom but merely Fashion; that there was
something ironic in the name the atheists chose when they called
themselves Secularists. By definition they had tied themselves to the
fashion of this world that passeth away.

These six conversions then were what the world would have forced upon
him: the Church as an alternative to a continually worsening
civilisation. While he hated the Utopias of the Futurists and while
he accepted the Christian view of life as a probation he felt too
that life today was abnormally degraded and unhappy.

There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there
is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox,
that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At
present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They
have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to
contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection
and dissatisfaction with themselves. But they have not got the
elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to
renew their hopes or restore their self-respect. They have not got
vision or conviction, or the mastery of their work, or the loyalty of
their household, or any form of human dignity. Even the latest
Utopians, the last lingering representatives of that fated and
unfortunate race, do not really promise the modern man that he shall
do anything, or own anything, or in any effectual fashion be
anything. They only promise that, if he keeps his eyes open, he will
see something; he will see the Universal Trust or the World State or
Lord Melchett coming in the clouds in glory. But the modern man
cannot even keep his eyes open. He is too weary with toil and a long
succession of unsuccessful Utopias. He has fallen asleep.*

[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, October 20, 1928.]

Chesterton demanded urgently that the worldlings who had failed to
make the world workable should abdicate. "The organic thing called
religion has in fact the organs that take hold on life. It can feed
where the fastidious doubter finds no food; it can reproduce where
the solitary sceptic boasts of being barren." In short, in religion
alone was Darwin justified, for Catholicism was the "spiritual
Survival of the Fittest."*

[* _Well and Shallows_, p. 82.]

If these Six Conversions are read without the balancing of something
deeper they have the super