The humanist cannot escape into the mystical nihilism that has so fascinated the Eastern World, because his initial choice has been an election for all human values. Romantic irrationality, be it aesthetic, political, or naturalistic, is an insult to his reason. His world outlook is grounded in the being of the world accepted in its fullness, and in the achievement of his own being through his affirmation of the world in which he exists. He cannot, without betraying the light which has been given him, join the oriental drive to the beyond. He has too much respect for _who_ he is, and for _where_ he is. Only faith, a Faith that confirms and sanctifies the foundations he has built, and a Faith that fills with reality his hunger for an eternal destiny, can guarantee his fundamental vision: personal perfection and the happiness that issues therefrom. The classical humanist, the old European, sees the gigantic hoax contained in all the pantheisms and nihilisms that have come riding out of the deserts to assault the citadel he has built. They offer everything to man, provided he destroy himself in the darkness of a mysticism or a philosophy that is at bottom hollow with atheism and nothingness. The only immortality worth having is one that is personal and that unites man with a Personal God who can bestow happiness on the creature of His Image. Man is, and only He Who Is can slake his thirst. _The Path to Rome: Christian Integration_ The Catholic Faith came to Hilaire Belloc from his birth to answer this humanist dilemma. Yet Faith came to him hard, and precisely because it did his final Christian affirmation has about it the resounding ring of iron: the iron which is the adherence of the will to a God unseen. If Belloc ever had what are called “religious experiences,” or supernatural “consolations” to aid him on his pilgrimage, he has kept them sedulously to himself. He seems to appear, the more closely he is read, as almost an archetype of skepticism conquered. There is a passage in _The Path to Rome_ that would lead one to think this born Catholic went through a severe siege of skepticism during the confused time of youth. Years later, in at least two published works, he hinted at something approaching a reconversion in which he awoke to a more fully articulated understanding of Catholicism. In the first place I was baptized into the Faith upon my birth, and have known it all my life.... Next, I have, though baptized into it and familiar with it from my earliest years, in some sense also discovered the Faith—but this I will not pursue as it is somewhat intimate, and hardly to the point; unless, indeed, it be to the point to tell those who read me and who are balancing, that I also have balanced.[22] The same sentiment, once again guarded in reticence, is made in an essay written on the death of Chesterton.