Gilbert Magazine with Lunch

I love Gilbert Magazine. Today I was reading as I ate my stew and was thrilled to see that Chesterton's cause for canonization is being investigated by Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton, England. Well, what a gift that would be the Church: the "apostle of common sense" raised to the honors of the altar! Certainly our age needs common sense more than almost anything else. Nonsense and madness have taken over most of our institutions as a few illustrations demonstrate:

A Wonderful Romp Through Life or Why I love Chesterton

If the only thing you've read of Chesterton is Orthodoxy, you may appreciate his wit, but not his childlike innocence. He was a lover of fairy tales and mystery stories, puppet theatres and games, but mostly he loved and enjoyed life with the exuberance of Father Christmas. I suspect Chesterton's little novel, Manalive, is his tongue-in-cheek laugh at himself.  The novel revels in the profoundly ridiculous and I could just see its hero, like the Pied Piper, attracting a crowd of little children dancing in his wake.

The protagonist, Innocent Smith, is a large man with a small head. And that, it seems to me, is the essence of Chesterton. He had a heart that required a large body to contain it, and a wise head that was not puffed up with its own brilliance. We meet Smith in a windstorm, leaping over the garden wall at Beacon House, a boarding house filled with solemn, cynical, and somewhat self-absorbed people. And like the wind that blew him into their lives, he blows them away creating a "crazy sense that it was everybody's birthday."