I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it
seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my
boyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-
chop whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed,
were still hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday
opening of museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and
vindictive as ever. There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the
utter damnableness of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious
damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn
Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed attack on poor little Wilkins the
novelist--who was being baited by the moralists at that time for
making one of his big women characters, not being in holy wedlock,
desire a baby and say so. . . .

The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We
do go on, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living
and dying now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding,
vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close
darknesses of these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of
Heaven, one wants a great wind from the sea!


3

While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in
themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant. They
had this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was
quietly taking for granted and let me see through it into realities--
realities I had indeed known about before but never realised. Each
of these experiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the