Xmas

"...I want to consult you about the Human Gazette. Shall we have a double Christmas number?"

"So long as you don't call it an Xmas number, I don't mind," said Basil. "I think it a disgrace to any Xian, with all the gospel of hard work which is as much the law of Xianity as it was of the carpenter's bench at Nazareth, to be so lazy that he can't take the trouble to spell his master's name, but must call him X."

"There is an algebraic truth in it," said Denis Marvell. "I think he is still the unknown quantity."

"I myself," said Gabriel, "could never get rid of a transcendental conviction that He was equal to N."

"Dear me, I never imagined you knew any mathematics, Gabriel," said Basil. "I thought you confined yourself entirely to the other wrongs of man."

"So I do," said the poet, "but you see N was the only algebraic sign I ever really loved: because it was equal to infinity. From my babyhood infinity has been my hobby."

-Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume XIV, p. 672, "The Human Club" (mid 1890's)