GKC on the subjects of the Eucharist and purgatory

G.K. Chesterton, commenting on the Eucharist in an article which appeared in Good Housekeeping in 1932:

If I am to answer the question, ‘How would Christ solve modern problems if He were on earth today’, I must answer it plainly; and for those of my faith there is only one answer. Christ is on earth today; alive on a thousand altars; and He does solve people’s problems exactly as He did when He was on earth in the more ordinary sense. That is, He solves the problems of the limited number of people who choose of their own free will to listen to Him.

Also, GKC humurously replying in G.K.'s Weekly (April 11, 1925) to an anti-Catholic attack by the Home Secretary, commenting on purgatory:

The Home Secretary is reported as saying, ‘We want no priestly interference, we ask for no purgatory, and we will submit to no compulsory confessional.’ The last clause of this declaration is especially a great relief to our minds. No longer shall we see a policeman seizing a man in the street by the scruff of the neck and dragging him to the nearest confessional-box. No longer will our love of liberty be outraged by the sinister bulk of the Black Maria taking its daily gang of compulsory penitents to Westminster Cathedral…But the passage that interests me…is the singular phrase that comes before it….the very remarkable phrase ‘We ask for no purgatory’…It seems to imply that when Sir William reaches the gates of another world, St Peter or some well-trained angel will say to him in a slightly lowered voice, in the manner of a well-trained butler, ‘Would you be requiring a purgatory?’

…it never occurs to Sir William Joynson-Hicks that…Purgatory may exist whether he likes it or not. If it be true, however incredible it may seem, that the powers ruling the universe think that a politician or a lawyer can reach the point of death, without being in that perfect ecstasy of purity that can see God and live- why then there may be cosmic conditions corresponding to that paradox, and there is an end of it. It may be obvious to us that the politician is already utterly sinless, at one with the saints. It may be evident to us that the lawyer is already utterly selfless, filled only with God and forgetful of the very meaning of gain. But if the cosmic power holds that there are still some strange finishing touches, beyond our fancy, to put to his perfection, then certainly there will be some cosmic provision for that mysterious completion of the seemingly complete. The stars are not clean in His sight and His angels He chargeth with folly; and if He should decide that even in a Home Secretary there is room for improvement, we can but admit that omniscience can heal the defect that we cannot even see.