Ralph Neale and Mrs. Cecil Chesterton.]

In an ordinary detective tale the investigator discovers that some
amiable-looking fellow who subscribes to all the charities, and is
fond of animals, has murdered his grandmother, or is a trigamist. I
thought it would be fun to make the tearing away of menacing masks
reveal benevolence.

Associated with that merely fantastic notion was the one that there
is actually a lot of good to be discovered in unlikely places, and
that we who are fighting each other may be all fighting on the right
side. I think it is quite true that it is just as well we do not,
while the fight is on, know all about each other; the soul must be
solitary; or there would be no place for courage.

A rather amusing thing was said by Father Knox on this point. He
said that he should have regarded the book as entirely pantheist and
as preaching that there was good in everything if it had not been for
the introduction of the one real anarchist and pessimist. But he was
prepared to wager that if the book survives for a hundred years--which
it won't--they will say that the real anarchist was put in afterwards
by the priests.

But, though I was more foggy about ethical and theological matters
than I am now, I was quite clear on that issue; that there was a
final adversary, and that you might find a man resolutely turned away
from goodness.

People have asked me whom I mean by Sunday. Well, I think, on the
whole, and allowing for the fact that he is a person in a tale--I
think you can take him to stand for Nature as distinguished from God.
Huge, boisterous, full of vitality, dancing with a hundred legs,
bright with the glare of the sun, and at first sight, somewhat
regardless of us and our desires.

There is a phrase used at the end, spoken by Sunday: "Can ye drink
from the cup that I drink of?" which seems to mean that Sunday is
God. That is the only serious note in the book, the face of Sunday
changes, you tear off the mask of Nature and you find God.

Monsignor Knox* has called _The Man Who Was Thursday_ "an
extraordinary book, written as if the publisher had commissioned him
to write something rather like the Pilgrim's Progress in the style of
the Pickwick Papers"--which explains perhaps why some reviewers
called it irreverent. The very wildness of it conveys a sense of
thoughts seething and straining in an ef