SOURCE: "The Credo of Mr. Gill," in The London Mercury, Vol. XXXIV, No. 200, June, 1936, p. 183.

In the following essay, Stapledon presents The Necessity of Belief as an accurate treatment of contemporary issues, but faults Gill for his tendency to proselytize.

Delightful yet exasperating, lucid yet confused, in some respects salutary yet in others pernicious, [The Necessity of Belief] strikingly illustrates at once the promise and the danger of the disposition not to be hypnotized by modern scientific culture. Delight is afforded by Mr. Gill's direct and even racy style, by his blend of gaiety and seriousness, by his relish of the life both of body and of spirit, above all by his insistence on values which in our day are apt to be over-looked. Exasperation, on the other hand, is sometimes aroused by his lighthearted neglect of the philosophical difficulties of his position, and also by his failure...