n to think about. If the next movement is the very
reverse of Protestantism, the Church will have something to say about
it; or rather has already something to say about it. You might unite
all High Churchmen on the High Church quarrel, but what authority is
to unite them when the devil declares his next war on the world?

Another quality that impresses me is the power of being decisive
first and being proved right afterwards. This is exactly the quality
a supernatural power would have; and I know nothing else in modern
religion that has it. For instance, there was a time when I should
have thought psychical enquiry the most reasonable thing in the
world, and rather favourable to religion. I was afterwards convinced,
by experience and not merely faith, that spiritualism is a practical
poison. Don't people see that _when_ that is found in experience, a
prodigious prestige accrues to the authority which, long before the
experiment, did not pretend to enquire but simply said, "Drop it."
We feel that the authority did not discover; it knew. There are a
hundred other things of which that story is true, in my own
experience. But the High Churchman has a perfect right to be a
spiritualistic enquirer; only he has not a right to claim that his
authority knew beforehand the truth about spiritualistic enquiry.

Of course there are a hundred things more to say; indeed the
greatest argument for Catholicism is exactly what makes it so hard to
argue for it. It is the scale and multiplicity of the forms of truth
and help that it has to offer. And perhaps, after all, the only thing
that you and I can really say with profit is exactly what you
yourself suggested; that we are men who have talked to a good many
men about a good many things, and seen something of the world and the
philosophies of the world and that we have not the shadow of a doubt
about what was the wisest act of our lives.

This letter, as we have seen, was written afterwards. Meanwhile the
story of the last slow but by no means uncertain steps is best told
in a series of undated letters to Father Ronald Knox:

DEAR FATHER KNOX,

It is hard not to have a silly feeling that demons, in the form of
circumstances, get in the way of what concerns one most, and I have
been distracted with details for which I have to be responsible, in
connection with the _New Witness_, which i