eached, a pretty hopefull young man, yet somewhat raw,
newly come from college, full of Latine sentences, which in time will
weare off._--JOHN EVELYN.

There is a story that when Father Knox was an undergraduate at Oxford he
sat down one day to choose whether he would be an agnostic or a Roman
Catholic. "But is there not some doubt in the matter?" inquired a friend
of mine, to whom I repeated the tale. "Did he really sit down and
choose, or did he only toss up?"

The story, of course, is untrue. It has its origin in the delightful wit
and brilliant playfulness of the young priest. Everybody loves him, and
nobody takes him seriously.

Few men of his intellectual stature have been received with so little
trumpet-blowing into the Roman Catholic Church, and none at all, I
think, has so imperceptibly retired from the Church of England. For all
the interest it excited, the secession of this extremely brilliant
person might have been the secession of a sacristan or a pew-opener. He
did not so much "go over to Rome" as sidle away from the Church of
England.

But this secession is well worth the attention of religious students. It
is an act of personality which helps one to understand the theological
chaos of the present-time, and a deed of temperament which illumines
some of the more obscure movements of religious psychology. Ronnie Knox,
as everybody calls him, the eyes lighting up at the first mention of his
name, has gone over to the Roman Catholic Church, not by any means with
a smile of cynicism on his face, but rather with the sweat of a struggle
still clinging to his soul.

He is the son of an Anglican bishop, a good man whose strong evangelical
convictions led him, among many other similar activities, to hold
missionary services on the sands of Blackpool. His mother died in his
infancy, and he was brought up largely with uncles and aunts, but his
own home, of which he speaks always with reverence and affection, was a
kind and vigorous establishment, a home well calculated to develop his
scholarly wit and his love of mischievous fun. Nothing in his
surroundings made for gloom or for a Calvinism of the soul. The
swiftness of his intellectual development might have made him sceptical
of theology in general, but no influence in his home was likely in any
way to make him sceptical of his father's theology in particular.

He went to Eton, and the religion in which he had been brought up stood
the moral test of the mo