ding that I
looked for. I had a friend, a Dominican: I approached him, and I
could see that for (as he thought) my own good he longed to convert
me to the Roman Church: it did not seem that he wanted, or by any
means knew how, to bring me into contact with God, but his thought
was to bring me to _The Church._ "Does anyone," I asked him,
"love God with all their heart, and mind, and soul, and strength?"
"No," said he, "that is hardly possible--what is required is--"; and
here he gave me once more the contents of the Ecclesiastical Mind:
more authoritatively, more positively; but he spoke as I now
commenced to realise all Churchmen would speak--that is to say, as
persons having learnt by study, by careful rule and rote, by
paper-knowledge, that which can only be learnt in the spirit direct from
God. How immense is the difference to the Soul between this
knowledge that comes of the spirit and the knowledge that comes of
study--the knowledge which too easily becomes mechanical religion!

I thought of the beautiful and gracious simplicity of the knowledge
that Christ gives to the soul: I saw the nature of the sore disease that
afflicts the soul of Christ's Church, I saw also a terrible pain for
Christ in all this of which I had previously been unaware.

I was thrown back and into myself by it all, and into a great
loneliness as far as my fellow-beings were concerned. Yet I
continued to need to share Christ with humanity, piercingly,
pressingly. I would go to a library and find a book--but, on the other
hand, I did not know the name of a single religious book or writer.
So I wrote my need to a friend, and she sent me the life of one,
Angela of Foligno. This book was a great delight to me, because,
though written in tiresome mediaeval language, it yet expressed and
shared exactly what I also knew and loved, and folded in strange
wrappings of the fashion of the thought of long ago lay the same
exquisite jewel that I also knew--the pearl for which men gladly sell
all that they have in order to keep it--the knowledge of the Secret of
the Kingdom of Heaven, of the Union of the Soul with God.

A few months went by, and I wrote asking for another book, and this
time came Richard Rolle to my acquaintance--a little dried-up
hermit, a holy man too, though I noticed how very discourteous he
was to women; severe, critical, and suspicious, merely because they
were women. How often I noticed this peculiarity, both in the monks
of to-da