Catholic culture produced Chaucer and his merry story-telling Canterbury Pilgrims. Licentious enthusiasm produced the lonely despair of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress – what a different sort of pilgrim! Catholic culture produced Don Quixote and St. Francis and Rabelais. What I wish to emphasize about there is their varied and rich-hearted humanity. I need scarcely indicate that everything that is especially hateful and devilish and inhuman about the conditions and strain of modern industrial society is not only Protestant in origin but it is their boast (!) to have originated it. You may know a thing by its fruit if you are silly enough or ignorant enough to wait that long. I find the fruits and the theory of our sects very bitter. Had I not encountered Chesterton, I would have remained Agnostic for many years at least. Chesterton did not convince me of Religious Truth, but he prevented my despair from becoming a habit or hardening into misanthropy. He opened my eyes to European culture and encouraged me to know it more closely. He taught me the reasons for all that [which] in me was simply blind anger and misery. He went through it himself; but since he lived where much Catholic culture remained and since he had genius, he got through it quicker.