(2 of 2)
Chesterton v. Wells. On the second day of the Catholic Congress, up reared the portentous bulk of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. England's three greatest publicists are the Messrs. Shaw, Chesterton and Herbert George Wells. Instead of replying to the Shavian sex sarcasm of the day before, Mr. Chesterton elected to assail Mr. Wells, evolutionist. He began by talking about atheists, of whom, he said, the world has very few. "An atheist," he boomed, "is much more difficult to emancipate than any one else because he is, above all people, the narrowest and most completely captive." But Mr. Wells is not even an atheist, explained Mr. Chesterton. He is merely antiChristian, which requires less logic, courage or consistency than being an atheist. "They [the Wells type of thinkers] talk about believing in a purpose in things and then tell you they don't believe in a divine person in whom a purpose resides. I cannot imagine anything like a purpose wandering about the world without any person to belong to.
"H. G. Wells used a phrase like this: 'Life will use me for its purpose.' That appears to me exactly like a man jumping from the top of Westminster Cathedral and saying, The force of gravity will use me.'"
During the week came word from Cardinal Bourne that Amanullah, deposed king of Afghanistan, had given up war-exalted Mohammedanism and was converted to Roman Catholicism. Reputed converter: a Jesuit priest.
Fact & Farce. Another speaker, the Rev. Owen M. Dudley, called Dean William Ralph Inge and the Rt. Rev. Ernest William Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham, "very ignorant men" because of their part in the movement against Anglo-Catholicism. The Church of England, said Mr. Dudley, is "fast becoming a farce. Numerically we [Anglo-Catholics] have just as much right to be the national church."
The Congress ended with a massed march to Westminster Cathedral* and a giant open air Mass, London's first.
* A Byzantine structure near the western end of Victoria Street, not to be confused with Gothic, Protestant Westminster Abbey at the eastern end.