I was not when I first met him as alive to the strength of that word “Catholic” as I am today; I myself have gone through a pilgrimage of approach, to an understanding in the matter.... Having said so much ... I will leave it, for it is too personal and has been too prolonged.[23] To a generation accustomed to the depiction of the psychology of grace, the personal reserve of the man, prolonged through a life devoted to religious controversy, is bound to be curious if not somewhat irritating. He reveals almost everything but the inner spiritual crisis. He apparently felt it was no one’s business but his own. Nothing could be more typically Bellocian. The Catholic Church appears in Belloc’s thought, as given us in his writing, as the custodian of the Faith—of a Faith beyond himself, objective, out there, demanding acceptance because it is the Truth. Emotional skepticism is disciplined by a reason that must affirm that which is. Christ came, claimed to be Divine, died, and came back in three days from the dead. Such is the evidence, and it is ultimately traceable, through tradition and written testimony, to the Apostles who saw it with their own eyes. Faith is not established, as such, by personal experience nor by private speculations, but on an evidence which is a heritage common to all mankind. Emotion may aid or may block faith, but the act of faith itself is eminently reasonable, and it is the business of the will to rectify reason and not permit it to be swamped in the vagaries of subjectivism. Belloc’s approach is by no means the only approach to religion, but it is one that is cold, hard, rational; the insight of a man with an intellect which is French in its incisiveness, directness, and confidence in itself. Such a faith is unbolstered by any natural religiosity, but for that very reason it presents a hard, diamond-like character, unyielding and dogmatic in its affirmations: a faith foreign to fashions, be they literary or philosophical. In a letter written to Chesterton upon the occasion of the latter’s entrance into the Church, Belloc compares the man of Faith to a man who walks through the rain at night, and who feels in his bones that he has gone thirty miles, but who knows well enough from his map and his reason that he has not travelled eleven. I am by all my nature of mind skeptical.... And as to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood, not a conclusion. My conclusion—and that of all men who have ever once _seen_ it—is the Faith: Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It. To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this statement may seem too desiccate.... It is my misfortune. In youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone, and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the more affirm it.[24]