Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton by Joseph Pearce

Author:Joseph Pearce [Pearce, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681496313
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2015-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

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Word Made Flesh

ON 29 MAY 1922 Maurice Baring sent Chesterton his condolences:

I only heard just lately the very sad news about your father.

I have been meaning to write to you ever since and the silence and delay has been due to no want of sympathy or thought of you; on the contrary I have lately felt strangely near to you, and I have had (quite wrongly perhaps) the impression that your bufferings were over and that your ship was in calm waters, well in sight of the harbour. Forgive me if this is all wrong.

I admired your father very much. He reminded me of my own father in being intensely English.

Dear Gilbert, I know what these things are and what one feels and I am so sorry for you.

God bless you.1

There is no doubt that the ‘calm waters’ to which Baring referred expressed his belief that Chesterton had finally found peace in a firm resolution to resolve the anomalous nature of his religious position. It is clear also that the ‘harbour’ in question was the Roman Catholic Church. When Baring had converted thirteen years earlier he recorded his own feelings in verse:

One day I heard a whisper: ‘Wherefore wait?

Why linger in a separated porch?

Why nurse the flicker of a severed torch?

The fire is there, ablaze beyond the gate.

Why tremble, foolish soul? Why hesitate?’2

The questions, answered so finally by both Baring and Cecil many years earlier, still required an answer from Gilbert, whose prolonged procrastination continued. His lingering concerns and fears, centred principally on the attitude of Frances, were voiced in a series of undated letters to Father Ronald Knox, another who had previously taken the step of conversion, in his case in highly controversial circumstances:

I feel horribly guilty in not having written before, and I do most earnestly hope you have not allowed my delay to interfere with any of your own arrangements. I have had a serious and very moving talk with my wife; and she is only too delighted at the idea of your visit in itself; in fact she really wants to know you very much. Unfortunately, it does not seem very workable at the time to which I suppose you referred. I imagine it more or less corresponds to next week; and we have only one spare bedroom yet, which is occupied by a nurse who is giving my wife a treatment that seems to be doing her good and which I don’t want to stop if I can help it. . . In our conversation my wife was all that I hope you will some day know her to be; she is incapable of wanting me to do anything but what I think right; and admits the same possibility for herself: but it is much more of a wrench for her, for she has been able to practise her religion in complete good faith; which my own doubts have prevented me from doing.

I will write again very soon.3

Although he did write again soon

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