es of the
creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and
cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work
of art must be small in the sight of the artist; to God the stars
might be only small and dear, like diamonds. And my haunting instinct
that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be
guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the
wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to
Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a
golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.*

[* _Orthodoxy_, Chapter V, pp. 142-4.]

In a chapter called "The Paradoxes of Christianity," the richness of
his mind is most manifest; and in that chapter can best be seen what
Mr. Belloc meant when he told me Chesterton's style reminded him of
St. Augustine's. Talking over with an old schoolfellow of his the
list of books he had, as we have seen, drawn up for _T.P.'s Weekly_,
I discovered deep doubt as to whether Gilbert would really have read
these books, as most of us understand reading, combined with a
conviction that he would have got out of them at a glance more than
most of us by prolonged study. I have certainly never known anyone
his equal at what the schoolboy calls "degutting" a book. He did not
seem to study an author, yet he certainly knew him.

But it remained that his own mind, reflecting and experiencing, made
of his own life his greatest storehouse, so that in all this book
there was, as my father pointed out in the _Dublin Review_ at the
time, an intensely original new light cast on the eternal philosophy
about which so much had already been written. The discovery specially
needed, perhaps, for his own age was that Christianity represented a
new balance that constituted a liberation. The ancient Greek or
Roman had aimed at equilibrium by enforcing moderation and getting
rid of extremes. Christianity "made moderation out of the still crash
of two impetuous emotions." It "got over the difficulty of combining
furious opposites by keeping them both, and keeping them both
furious." "The more I considered Christianity, the more I felt
that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of
that order was to give room for good things to run wild." Thus
inside Christianity the pacifist could become a monk, and the
warrior a Crusader, St. Francis could praise good