This sense that the Church was needed to fight for the world was very strong in Gilbert when he hailed it to his mother as the "one fighting form of Christianity." In the New Witness he answered near this time a newspaper suggestion that the Church 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 Mary. He would, too, recite Swinburne's own lines "deliberately directing them away from Swinburne's intention and supposing them addressed to the new Christian Queen of life, rather than to the fallen Pagan queen of death."
But I turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide
in the end
Goddess and maiden and queen be near me now and befriend.
Nor was it only admiration for art that made him write—also in early youth: