thought at first to be a
kind of Pentecost but had in reality "come together to rebuild the
Tower of Babel." And this because it had no common basis in religion.
"Humanitarianism does not unite humanity. For even one isolated man
is half divine." But today man had despaired of man. "Hope for the
superman is another name for despair of man."

Reading a recent commentary in a review, I suddenly saw that politics
and economics were not what mattered most in the paper. The
commentary in question was to the effect that _G.K.'s Weekly_ was
inferior to the _New Witness_ because G.K. had "only" general
principles and ideas and no detailed inside knowledge of how the
world of finance and politics was going. Looking again through the
articles I had marked as most characteristically his, I saw that they
were not only chiefly about ideas and principles but also that they
were mostly pure poetry. Chesterton was, I believe, greatest and most
permanently effective when he was moved, not by a passing irritation
with the things that pass, but by the great emotions evoked by the
Eternal, emotions which in Eternity alone will find full fruition.

There are in the paper articles in which, appearing to speak out of
his own knowledge, he is merely repeating information given him by
Belloc. And it was quite out of Chesterton's character to write with
certainty about what he did not know with certainty. Hence this
writing is his weakest. But the paper has, too, some of his strongest
work and his mind as he drew to the end of life lingered on thoughts
that had haunted him in its beginning.

Before the Boer War had introduced me to politics, or worse still
to politicians [he wrote in a Christmas article in 1934], I had some
vague and groping ideas of my own about a general view or vision of
existence. It was a long time before I had anything worth calling a
religion; what I had was not even sufficiently coherent to be called
a philosophy. But it was, in a sense, a view of life; I had it in the
beginning; and I am more and more coming back to it in the end. . . .
my original and almost mystical conviction of the miracle of all
existence and the essential excitement of all experience.*

[* December 6, 1934.]

This he felt must be the profound philosophy by which Distributism
should succeed and whereby he tested the modern world and found it
wanting--

something of which Christmas is the best traditional symbol