t and love the
universe. But that he wrote later. The quotations given here come
from the Notebook begun in 1894 and used at intervals for the next
four or five years, in which Gilbert wrote down his philosophy step
by step as he came to discover it. The handwriting is the work of art
that he must have learnt and practised, so different is it from his
boyhood's scrawl. Each idea is set down as it comes into his mind.
There is no sequence. In this book and in _The Coloured Lands_ may be
seen the creation of the Chesterton view of life--and it all took
place in his early twenties. From the seed-thoughts here, _Orthodoxy_
and the rest were to grow--here they are only seeds but seeds
containing unmistakably the flower of the future:

They should not hear from me a word
Of selfishness or scorn
If only I could find the door
If only I were born.

He makes the Unborn Babe say this in his first volume of poems. And
in the Notebook we see how the babe coming into the world must keep
this promise by accepting life with its puzzles, its beauty, its
fleetingness: "Are we all dust? What a beautiful thing dust is
though." "This round earth may be a soap-bubble, but it must be
admitted that there are some pretty colours on it." "What is the good
of life, it is fleeting; what is the good of a cup of coffee, it is
fleeting. Ha Ha Ha."

The birthday present of birth, as he was later to call it in
_Orthodoxy_, involved not bare existence only but a wealth of other
gifts. "A grievance," he heads this thought:

Give me a little time,
I shall not be able to appreciate them all;
If you open so many doors
And give me so many presents, O Lord God.

He is almost overwhelmed with all that he has and with all that is,
but accepts it ardently in its completeness.

If the arms of a man could be a fiery circle embracing the round
world, I think I should be that man.

Yet in the face of all this splendour the pessimist dares to find
flaws:

The mountains praise thee, O Lord!
But what if a mountain said,
"I praise thee;
But put a pine-tree halfway up on the left
It would be much more effective, believe me."
It is time that the religion of prayer gave
place to the religion of praise.

If the mountains must praise God, if the religion of praise expresses
the truth of things, how much more does it express the truth of
humanity--or rather of men, for he saw humanity not as an abstraction