Many in middle age are finding how far they have travelled from the opinions of their youth, in most of those sublunary matters subject to the rule of opinion. In youth our opinions commonly present themselves to us in the guise of convictions; it is part of the process of growing up (and indeed of growing old), that we learn how much greater the field of mere opinion is than we imagined it in our youth. The two books before us represent for the present writer, and for others of his generation, something of that gradual revolution in ideas which the sheer pressure of events has brought to birth in us.

First let us look at Gill, who recalls our youth, Distributism, Belloc, Chesterton, and all that happy romantic hangover from the 19th century into our own day, which beguiled us in the twenties. Few will take Gill as seriously as does the Editor of these letters, describing him as one of the ‘greatest minds of the day’, and even gracing his thought with the high name of ‘philosophy’. One admits readily the fascination of Gill, his passionate didactic style, his capacity for self-revelation, his sincerity at times almost fanatical, his vision crystal-clear but narrow in range. But these qualities which constitute the attraction of Gill for so many are bought at a high price—the price of a sort of affected ignorance on his part of those many things which did not interest him. Say if you will a sort of refusal to acknowledge the existence of the total field of reality—a vicious habit of simplifying the complex.