ought to "move with
the times."

The Cities of the Plain might have remarked that the heavens above
them did not altogether fit in with their own high civilisation and
social habits. They would be right. Oddly enough, however, when
symmetry was eventually restored, it was not the heavens that had
been obliged to adapt themselves. . . .

The Church cannot move with the times; simply because the times are
not moving. The Church can only stick in the mud with the times, and
rot and stink with the times. In the economic and social world, as
such, there is no activity except that sort of automatic activity
that is called decay; the withering of the high Powers of freedom and
their decomposition into the aboriginal soil of slavery. In that way
the world stands much at the same stage as it did at the beginning of
the Dark Ages. And the Church has the same task as it had at the
beginning of the Dark Ages; to save all the light and liberty that
can be saved, to resist the downward drag of the world, and to wait
for better days. So much a real Church would certainly do; but a real
Church might be able to do more. It might make its Dark Ages
something more than a seed-time; it might make them the very reverse
of dark. It might present its more human ideal in such abrupt and
attractive a contrast to the inhuman trend of the time, as to inspire
men suddenly for one of the moral revolutions of history; so that men
now living shall not taste of death until they have seen justice
return.

We do not want, as the newspapers say, a Church that will move with
the world. We want a Church that will move the world. We want one
that will move it away from many of the things towards which it is
now moving; for instance, the Servile State. It is by that test that
history will really judge, of any Church, whether it is the real
Church or no.

CHAPTER XXIV

Completion

THERE IS ONE part of this story that has not been told with the rest:
Our Lady's share in Gilbert's conversion. The Chesterton family had
been quite without the strange Protestant prejudice that in the minds
of many Englishmen sets the Mother of God against God the Son. Our
lady was respected though of course not invoked. In a boyhood poem
Gilbert took the blasphemous lines of Swinburne's "Hymn to
Proserpine" and wrote a kind of parody in reverse turning the poem
into a hymn to M