e their
devotions in its presence; he would find it hard to keep himself
from saying, like Browning at High Mass, "This is too good not to
be true."

Might he not perhaps say with another great man, "What must God be if He
is pleased by things which simply displease His educated creatures?" In
a country where the churches were once far more crowded than in Belgium,
I was told by a discerning man, Prince Alexis Obolensky, a former
Procurator of the Holy Synod, that all such devotion is simply
superstition. He said he would gladly give me all Russia's spirituality
if I could give him a tenth of England's moral earnestness. And he told
me this story:

A man set out one winter's night to murder an old woman in her
cottage. As he tramped through the snow with the hatchet under his
blouse, it suddenly occurred to him that it was a Saint's Day.
Instantly he dropped on his knees in the snow, crossed himself
violently with trembling hands, and in a guilty voice implored God
to forgive him for his evil intention. Then he rose up, refreshed
and forgiven, postponing the murder till the next night.

Undoubtedly, I fear, the devotion of priest-ridden countries, which
evokes so spectacular an effect on the stranger of unbalanced judgment,
is largely a matter of superstition; how many prayers are inspired by a
lottery, how many candles lighted by fear of a ghost?

But Father Knox, whose aesthetic nature had early responded with a vital
impulse to Gothic architecture and the pomp and mystery of priestly
ceremonial, felt in Bruges that the spirit of the Chapel of the Sacred
Blood must be introduced into the Church of England "to save our country
from lapsing into heathenism." What, I wonder, is his definition of that
term, heathenism?

Bruges had a decisive effect, not only on his aesthetic impulses, but on
his moral sense. His conduct as an Anglican priest was frankly that of a
Roman propagandist. I do not know that any words more damning to the
Romish spirit have ever been written than those in which this most
charming and brilliant young man tells the story of his treachery to the
Anglican Church. Of celebrating the Communion service he says:

. . . my own principle was, whenever I spoke aloud, to use the
language of the Prayer Book, when I spoke _secreto_, to use the
words ordered by the Latin missal.

He said of his propaganda work at this time:

The Rom