ion. Mr. Hammond's contemporary work on English social
history fitted into Belloc's more vivid if less documented
vision--none of this could be disregarded by later writers.

Belloc, too, restored that earlier England to the Christendom to
which it belonged. The England of Macaulay or of Green had, like Mr.
Mantalini's dowager, either no outline or a "demned outline" for it
was cut out of a larger map. And Chesterton was always seeking an
outline of history.

To get England back into the context of Christendom is a great thing:
just how great must depend upon how rightly Christendom is conceived.
One cannot always escape the feeling that Belloc conceives it too
narrowly. His famous phrase "The Faith is Europe and Europe is the
Faith" omits too much--the East out of which Christianity came; the
new worlds into which Europe has flowed. Belloc of course knows these
things and has often said them. It is rather a question of emphasis,
of how things loom in the mind when judgments have to be made. In
that sense he does tend to narrow the Faith to Europe: in exactly the
same sense he does tend to narrow Europe to France. Born in France of
a French father, educated in England, Belloc chose his mother's
nationality, chose to be English; but his Creator had chosen
differently, and there is not much a man can do in competition with
his Creator. I do not for a moment suggest that Belloc, having chosen
to be English, is conscious of anything but loyalty to the country of
his adoption. The thing lies far below the mind's conscious
movements. Belloc thinks of himself as an Englishman with a patriotic
duty to criticise his country, but his feelings are not really those
of an Englishman. Once at least he recognised this when he wrote the
verse:

England to me that never have malingered,
Nor spoken falsely, nor your flattery used,
_Nor even in my rightful garden lingered_--: *
What have you not refused?

[* Italics mine.]

And just as France was Belloc's rightful garden so England was
Chesterton's. When first they talked of the Church he told Belloc
that he wanted the example of "someone entirely English who should
none the less have come in." When criticising his country his voice
has the note of pain that only love can give. Belloc saw him as
intensely national "English of the English . . . a mirror of
England . . . he writes with an English accent."

It is of some interest that after meeting Belloc Gilbert added notes
to two