ilbert
Chesterton had shown his firm belief in the Godhead of Our Lord, in
Sacraments, in Priesthood and in the Authority of the Church. But it
was not yet the Catholic and Roman Church. There is a revealing
passage in the _Autobiography:_ "And then I happened to meet Lord
Hugh Cecil. I met him at the house of Wilfrid Ward, that great
clearing house of philosophies and theologies. . . . I listened to
Lord Hugh's very lucid statements of his position. . . . The
strongest impression I received was that he was a Protestant. I was
myself still a thousand miles from being a Catholic; but I think it
was the perfect and solid Protestantism of Lord Hugh that fully
revealed to me that I was no longer a Protestant."

The time that thousand miles took is a real problem--the years before
the illness during which he talked of joining the Church, the seven
further years before he joined it. Cecil Chesterton had been received
before the war--just at the beginning of the Marconi Case, in
fact--and the entire outlook of both brothers had seemed to make this
inevitable, not only theologically but sociologically and
historically. Alike in their outlook on Europe today or on the great
ages of the past, it was a Catholic civilisation based on Catholic
theology that seemed to them the only true one for a full and rich
human development.

I think in this matter a special quality and its defect could be seen
in Gilbert. For most people intensity of thought is much more
difficult than action. With him it was the opposite. He used his mind
unceasingly, his body as little as possible. I remember one day going
to see them when he had a sprained ankle and learning from Frances
how happy it made him because nobody could bother him to take
exercise. The whole of practical life he left to her. But joining the
Church was not only something to be thought about, it was something
really practical that had to be done, and here Frances could not help
him.

"He will need Frances," said Father O'Connor to my mother, "to take
him to church, to find his place in his prayer-book, to examine his
conscience for him when he goes to Confession. He will never take all
those hurdles unaided." Frances never lifted a finger to prevent
Gilbert from joining the Catholic Church. But obviously before she
was convinced herself she could not help him. The absence of help was
in this case a very positive hindrance.

I remember one day on a picnic Gilbert coming up to me