concerned with these charges and the
conduct and motives of Smith. But Chesterton is a clever barrister, and
shows that the motives behind the 'crimes' are not only within the law,
but are extremely useful and throw a new light on criminology.

The crime of murder of which Smith is accused is one that he is supposed
to have perpetrated in his college days. It was nothing less than firing
at the Warden. The reason was not at all that Smith wanted to murder the
Warden, but, rather, to discover if his theory of 'the elimination of
life being desirable' was a sincere one. It was not. As soon as the
Professor thought he might attain the desired bliss of death, he desired
more than anything that he might live. The fact, then, that Smith
pointed a pistol at his Warden was perfectly justifiable; it had the
eminently good principle of wishing to test a theory.

If Smith was a bigamist he was so with his own wife, only that he
happened to like to live with her in various places; if he was a
burglar, he was perfectly justified, because he merely robbed his own
house--in fact, he does not wish to steal, because he can covet his own
goods. Chesterton, on these grounds, acquits the prisoner.

At the end of the book another or the same great gale springs up, and
Smith, accompanied by Mary of the boarding-house, disappears. Clever as
Chesterton's explanations of the crimes are, we shall not probably shoot
at the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in order to demonstrate
to him how desirable life really is; we shall not burgle our own
sitting-room for the mere excitement of it; we shall not flit with our
wife from Peckham to Marylebone, from Singapore to Bagdad, to imagine
that we are bigamists or polygamists; rather, we shall sit at home and
sigh that all crimes cannot be as easily settled as those Chesterton
propounds and shows are not crimes at all.

'THE BALL AND THE CROSS'

It is usually assumed that a theological argument is a dull and prosy
affair that has as its perpetrators either Professors of Theology or
Professors of Rationalism. It is, of course, true that many Professors
of Theology are dull, but they do not usually argue about theology at
all. Professors of Rationalism are equally dull and are seldom happy
when not engaged on the hopeless task of trying to understand God when
they know nothing about Man and little about Satan.

'The Ball and the Cross' is a theological novel. It is, without any
doubt, the m