Thus if the gospel was a riddle the Church was the answer to the riddle because both were created by One Who Knew: Who saw the ages in which His own creation was to find completion: Whose morality was not one of another age but of another world.
Chesterton gathered history in his mind and saw together before the Christmas Crib the shepherds who had found their shepherd, the philosopher kings who "would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete."*
[* The Everlasting Man, p. 211.]
G.K. too had needed the completion of incomplete human thought: he too had followed the star from a far country. It had been a fancy of his boyhood, caught from a fairytale, that evil lurked somewhere in a hidden room of the human house and the human heart. He saw in the history of the ancients a consciousness of the Fall, in the sadness of their songs a sense of "the Presence of the Absence of God." But at Bethlehem he saw the transformation that had come upon the whole race of man with that little local infancy concealing the mighty power of God who had put Himself under the feet of the world.
It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness, that is there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.
[* Ibid., p. 223.]
It seems to me profoundly significant that Gilbert studied first in the little Poor Man of Assisi what Christ could do in one man before he came on to the study of what He had done in mankind as a whole, of Who He was who had done it. For the man thus chosen embodied the ideals that Gilbert had seen dimly in his boyhood—ideals that most of us accept a little reluctantly from the Church, but which had actually attracted him towards the Church. St. Francis "had found the secret of life in being the servant and the secondary figure". . . "he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking." "By nature he was the sort of man who has that vanity which is the opposite of pride, that vanity which is very near to humility. He never despised his fellow creatures and therefore he never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures, including the admiration of his fellow creatures." "He was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss."
Here, in St. Francis, Gilbert saw the apotheosis of his old boyish thought—that thanksgiving is a duty and a joy, that we should love not "humanity" but each human. Things shadowed in the Notebook are in St. Francis, for
the transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him of his lady. A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing; but indeed though they would both be telling the truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith.*
[* St. Francis of Assisi, p. 111.]