For she is a woman: Regina Angelorum, Queen of Powers and Archangels, she yet belongs to the human race.
Our lady went into a strange country,
Our lady, for she was ours
And had run on the little hills behind the houses
And pulled small flowers;
But she rose up and went into a strange country
With strange thrones and powers.
From a welter of comment and correspondence that followed his conversion—challenging, scorning, rejoicing, welcoming, I select two letters from the two closest of Gilbert's Catholic friends—Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring.
i.VIII.22.
MY DEAR GILBERT,
I write to you, from these strange surroundings, the first line upon the news you gave me. I must write to you again when I have collected myself: for my reactions are abominably slow. I have, however, something to say immediately: and that is why I write this very evening, just after seeing Eleanor off at the Station. The thing I have to say is this (I could not have said it before your step: I can say so now. Before it would have been like a selected pleading.) The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is which the will deliberately confirms. And that is why Faith though an act of the Will is Moral. If the Ordnance Map tells us that it is 11 miles to know it is not yet 11 I have gone.
I am by all my nature of mind sceptical. . . . And as to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood: not a conclusion. My conclusion—and that of all men who have ever once seen it—is the Faith; Corporate, organised, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.
To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this statement may seem too desiccate. It is indeed not enthusiastic. It lacks meat.
It is my misfortune. In youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the more affirm it, as a man in a desert knows that water is right for man: or as a wounded dog not able to walk, yet knows the way home.
The Catholic Church is the natural home of the human spirit. The odd perspective picture of life which looks like a meaningless puzzle at first, seen from that one standpoint takes a complete order and meaning, like the skull in the picture of the Ambassadors.