Mother's body and kisses the Mystic Rose of her lips:

A woman was His walking home
Foederis Arca Ora pro nobis.

And he thinks of the sun, moon and stars as trinkets for her to play
with:

With the great heart a woman has
And the love of little things.

For she is a woman: Regina Angelorum, Queen of Powers and Archangels,
she yet belongs to the human race.

Our lady went into a strange country,
Our lady, for she was ours
And had run on the little hills behind the houses
And pulled small flowers;
But she rose up and went into a strange country
With strange thrones and powers.

From a welter of comment and correspondence that followed his
conversion--challenging, scorning, rejoicing, welcoming, I select two
letters from the two closest of Gilbert's Catholic friends--Hilaire
Belloc and Maurice Baring.

i.VIII.22.

MY DEAR GILBERT,

I write to you, from these strange surroundings, the first line
upon the news you gave me. I must write to you again when I have
collected myself: for my reactions are abominably slow. I have,
however, something to say immediately: and that is why I write this
very evening, just after seeing Eleanor off at the Station. The thing
I have to say is this (I could not have said it before your step: I
can say so now. Before it would have been like a selected pleading.)
The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its
doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This
it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is
which the will deliberately confirms. And that is why Faith though an
act of the Will is Moral. If the Ordnance Map tells us that it is 11
miles to [a place] then, my mood of lassitude as I walk through the
rain at night making it feel like 30, I use the Will and say "No." My
intelligence has been convinced and I compel myself to use it against
my mood. It is 11 and though I feel in the depths of my being to have
gone 30 miles and more, I _know_ it is not yet 11 I have gone.

I am by all my nature of mind sceptical. . . . And as to the doubt
of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood: not a conclusion. My
conclusion--and that of all men who have ever once seen it--is the
Faith; Corporate, organised, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a
theory. It.

To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, t