. It was
then no more than a notion about the point at which extremes meet,
and the most common thing becomes a cosmic and mystical thing. I did
not want so much to alter the place and use of things as to weight
them with a new dimension; to deepen them by going down to the
potential nothing; to lift them to infinity by measuring from zero.

The most logical form of this is in thanks to a Creator; but at
every stage I felt that such praises could never rise too high;
because they could not even reach the height of our own thanks for
unthinkable existence, or horror of more unthinkable non-existence.
And the commonest things, as much as the most complex, could thus
leap up like fountains of praise. . . .

We shall need a sort of Distributist psychology, as well as a
Distributist philosophy. That is partly why I am not content with
plausible solutions about credit or corporative rule. We need a new
(or old) theory and practice of pleasure. The vulgar school of panem
et circenses only gives people circuses; it does not even tell them
how to enjoy circuses. But we have not merely to tell them how to
enjoy circuses. We have to tell them how to enjoy enjoyment.*

[* December 13, 1934.]

In attacking a special abuse, Chesterton was most successful when he
took the thought to a deeper depth. The following Christmas (1935) he
wrote:

We live in a terrible time, of war and rumour of war. . . .
International idealism in its effort to hold the world together . . .
is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply
that it does not go deep enough. . . . If we really wish to make
vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder we must
see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family;
and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod.

The modern world tended to gild pure gold and then try to scrape the
gilt off the gingerbread, to paint the lily and then complain of its
gaudiness. Thus it had vulgarised Christmas and now demanded the
abolition of Christmas because it was vulgar. It was the truth he had
emphasised years ago in contrast with Shaw: the world had spoilt the
ideas but it was the Christian ideas the world needed, if only in
order to recover the human ideas. He went on--

If we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the
hunger of a human being. . . . We must say first of the begga