his wife, because wine is drunk
in the house or there are Greek statues in the hall. Suppose he goes
off on his own and develops broader ideas. On the day he drinks his
first glass of wine, I think it is essential to his honour that he
should go back to his father or his friend and say, "You are right
and I was wrong, and we will drink wine together." It is not
consonant with his honour that he should set up a house of his own
with wine and statues and every parallel particular, and still treat
the other as if he were in the wrong. That is mean because it is
making the best of both; it is combining the advantages of being
right with the advantages of having been wrong. Any analogy is
imperfect; but I think you see what I mean.

The larger version of this is that England has really got into so
wrong a state, with its plutocracy and neglected populace and
materialistic and Servile morality, that it must take a sharp turn
that will be a sensational turn. No _evolution_ into Catholicism will
have that moral effect. Christianity is the religion of repentance;
it stands against modern fatalism and pessimistic futurism mainly in
saying that a man can go back. If we do decidedly go back it will
show that religion is alive. For the rest, I do not say much about
the details of continuity and succession, because the truth is they
did not much affect me. What I see is that we cannot complain of
England suffering from being Protestant and at the same time claim
that she has always been Catholic. That there has always been a High
Church Party is true; that there has always been an Anglo-Catholic
Party may be true, but I am not so sure of it. But there is one
matter arising from that which I do think important. Even the High
Church Party, even the Anglo-Catholic Party only confronts a
particular heresy called Protestantism upon particular points. It
defends ritual rightly or even sacramentalism rightly, because these
are the things the Puritans attacked. If it is not the heresy of an
age, at least it is only the anti-heresy of an age. But since I have
been a Catholic, I have become conscious of being in a much vaster
arsenal, full of arms against countless other potential enemies. The
Church, as the Church and not merely as ordinary opinion, has
something to say to philosophies which the merely High Church has
never had occasio