ficial look that belongs of necessity to
Apologetics. Some essays in _The Well and the Shallows_, most of _The
Thing, Christendom in Dublin_, and above all, _The Queen of Seven
Swords_ give us that deeper quieter thinking when the mind is
meditating upon the great mysteries of the faith.

Only very occasionally is it possible to glimpse beneath Gilbert's
reserve, but such glimpses are illuminating. Father Walker, who
prepared him for his First Communion, writes, "It was one of the most
happy duties I had ever to perform. . . . That he was perfectly well
aware of the immensity of the Real Presence on the morning of his
First Communion, can be gathered from the fact that he was covered
with perspiration when he actually received Our Lord. When I was
congratulating him he said, 'I have spent the happiest hour of my
life.'"

Yet he went but seldom to Holy Communion, and an unfinished letter to
Father Walker gives the reason. "The trouble with me is that I am
much too frightened of that tremendous Reality on the altar. I have
not grown up with it and it is too much for me. I think I am morbid;
but I want to be told so by authority."

And in _Christendom in Dublin_, he says: "The word Eucharist is but a
verbal symbol, we might say a vague verbal mask, for something so
tremendous that the assertion and the denial of it have alike seemed
a blasphemy; a blasphemy that has shaken the world with the
earthquake of two thousand years."

I have heard it said that in these later years Gilbert's writing
became obscure, and I think it is partly true. Only partly, for the
old clarity is still there except when he is dealing with matters
almost too deep for human speech. He wrote in _The Thing:_

A thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism
. . . the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity or the Blessed
Sacrament are the starting-point for trains of thought . . .
stimulating, subtle and even individual. . . . To accept the Logos as
a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St.
John the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the
world. . . . To exalt the Mass is to enter into a magnificent world
of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and
mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as
well as the most personal affections. . . . Even what are called the
fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull.