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 most critical years in boyhood. It never failed him, and he never questioned it. But when that trial was over, and after an illness which shook up his body and mind, he came under the influence of a matron who held with no little force of character the views of the Anglo-Catholic party. These views stole gradually into the mind of the rather effeminate boy, and although they did not make him question the theology of his father for some years, he soon found himself thinking of the religious opinions of his uncles and aunts with a certain measure of superiority.

“I began to feel,” he told me, “that I was living in a rather provincial world-the world described by Wells and Arnold Bennett.”

This restlessness, this desire to escape into a greater and more beautiful world, pursued him to Oxford, and, for the moment, he found that greater and beautiful world in the life of Balliol. Bishop Ryle, a good judge, has spoken to me of the young man’s extraordinary facility at turning English poetry at sight into the most melodious Greek and Latin, and of the remarkable range of his scholarship. He himself has told us of his love of port and bananas, his joy in early morning celebrations in the chapel of Pusey House, his tea-parties, his delight in debates at the Union, of which he became President, and of his many friendships with undergraduates of a witty and flippant turn of mind. Like many effeminate natures, he was glad of opportunities to prove himself a good fellow. In spite of no heel-taps when the port went round, he won the Hertford in 1907, the Ireland and Craven in 1908, and in 1910 took a first in Greats.

He became a Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College for two years, then its Chaplain for five years, and, after leading a life of extravagant and fighting ritualism as an Anglican priest, at the end of that period, 1917, he retired from the Church of England and was received into the Church of Rome.

The consolations of Anglo-Catholicism, then, were insufficient for the spiritual needs of this scion of the Low Church.

What were those needs?

Were they, indeed, spiritual needs, as he suggests by the title of his book A Spiritual AEneid, or aesthetic needs, the needs of a temperament?-a temperament which used wit and raillery chiefly as a shield for its shrinking and quivering emotions, emotions which we must take note of if we are to understand his secession.

He was at Eton when a fire occurred in one of the houses, two boys perishing in the flames. He tells us that this tragedy made an impression on him, for it fell at a time in his life when “one begins to fear death.” Fear is a word which meets us even in the sprightly pages of A Spiritual AEneid, a volume perhaps more fitly to be termed “An AEsthetic Ramp.”

He loved to dash out of college through the chill mists of a November morning to worship with “the few righteous men” of the University in the Chapel of Pusey House, which “conveyed a feeling, to me most gratifying, of catacombs, oubliettes, Jesuitry, and all the atmosphere of mystery that had long fascinated me.”

He tells us how his nature “craved for human sympathy and support,” and speaks of the God whom he “worshipped, loved, and feared.” He prayed for a sick friend with “both hands held above the level of my head for a quarter of an hour or more.” He was a Universalist “recoiling from the idea of hell.” He believed in omens, though he did not always take them, and was thoroughly superstitious. “The name of Rome has always, for me, stood out from any printed page merely because its initial is that of my own name.” “At the time of my ordination I took a private vow, which I always kept, never to preach without making some reference to Our Lady, by way of satisfaction for the neglect of other preachers.” He was a youth when he took the vow of celibacy. He had the desire, he tells us, to make himself thoroughly uncomfortable-as Byron would say, “to merit Heaven by making earth a Hell.” His superstitions were often ludicrous even to himself. On one occasion in boyhood, he was trying to get a fire to burn: “Let this be an omen,” he said. “If I can get this fire to burn, the Oxford Movement was justified.”

A visit to Belgium hastened the inevitable decision of such a temperament:

. . . the extraordinary devotion of the people wherever we went,
particularly at Bruges, struck home with a sense of immeasurable
contrast to the churches of one’s own country. . . .

He did not apparently feel the moral contrast between Belgian and English character.

. . . The tourist, I know, thinks of it as Bruges la Morte, but then the tourist does not get up for early Masses; he would find life then . . . he can at least go on Friday morning to the chapel of the Saint Sang and witness the continuous stream of people that flows by, hour after hour, to salute the relic and to make 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 Roman Catholics . . . have to serenade the British public from
the drive; we Anglican Catholics have the entree to the
drawing-room.

His enthusiasm for the Roman service was such that in one place

I had to travel for three quarters of an hour to find a church where my manner of celebrating, then perhaps more reminiscent of the missal than of the Prayer Book, was tolerated even in a Mass of Devotion.

About this time I celebrated at a community chapel. One of the
brethren was heard to declare afterwards that if he had known what
I was going to do he would have got up and stopped me.

At the conclusion of one of his celebrations abroad, an Englishman in the congregation exclaimed, “Thank God that’s over.” After his first sermon in Trinity Chapel, an undergraduate ("afterwards not only my friend but my penitent”) was heard to declare excitedly:

“Such fun! The new Fellow’s been preaching heresy-all about Transubstantiation.”

Such fun! This note runs through the whole of A Spiritual AEneid. A thoroughly undergraduate spirit inspires every page save the last. Religion is treated as a lark. It is full of opportunities for plotting and ragging and pulling the episcopal leg. One is never conscious, not for a single moment, that the author is writing about Jesus of Nazareth, Gethsemane, and Calvary. About a Church, yes; about ceremonial, about mysterious rites, about prayers to the Virgin Mary, about authority, and about bishops; yes, indeed; but about Christ’s transvaluation of values, about His secret, about His religion of the pure heart and the childlike spirit, not one single glimpse.

Now let us examine his intellectual position.

In the preface to Some Loose Stones, written before he went over to
Rome, he explains his position to the modernist:

. . . there are limits defined by authority, within which theorising
is unnecessary and speculation forbidden.

But I should like here to enter a protest against the assumption
. . . that the obscurantist, having fenced himself in behind his wall
of prejudices, enjoys an uninterrupted and ignoble peace.

The soldier who has betaken himself to a fortress is thereby in a more secure position than the soldier who elects to fight in the open plain. He has ramparts to defend him. But he has, on the other hand, ramparts to defend. . . . For him there is no retreat.

The whole position stands or falls by the weakest parts in the
defences; give up one article of the Nicene Creed, and the whole
situation is lost; you go under, and the flag you loved is forfeit.

And yet:

I can feel every argument against the authenticity of the Gospels, because I know that if I approached them myself without faith I should as likely as not brush them aside impatiently as one of a whole set of fables.

They would be fables to him unless he approached them with faith. And what is faith? He tells us in the same preface: “Faith is to me, not an intellectual process, but a divine gift, a special privilege.”

It is fair to say that he would now modify this definition, for he has told me that it is a heresy to exclude from faith the operations of the intellect. But the words were written when he was fighting the battle of the soul, written almost on the same page as that which bears these words:

You have not done with doubt, because you have thrown yourself into the fortress; you are left to keep doubt continually at bay, with the cheerful assurance that if you fail, the whole of your religious life has been a ghastly mistake . . .

for this reason, they have, I think, a notable significance.

Is it not probable that Father Knox has thrown himself into a fortress, not out of any burning desire to defend it, but solely to escape from the enemy of his own soul? Is it not probable that he was driven from the field by Fear rather than summoned to the battlements by Love?

I find this inference justified in numerous ways, and I do not think on the whole that Father Knox himself would deny it. But chiefly I find it justified by the form and substance of his utterances since he became a Roman Catholic-fighting and most challenging utterances which for me at any rate are belied, and tragically belied, by a look in his eyes which is unmistakably, I am forced to think, the look of one who is still wrestling with doubt, one, I would venture to hazard, who may even occasionally be haunted by the dreadful fear that his fortress is his prison.

On the day that Newman entered that fortress the triumphant cry of St. Augustine rang in his ears, Securus judicat orbis terrarum; but later came the moan Quis mihi tribuat, and later still the stolen journey to Littlemore and that paroxysm of tears as he leaned over the lych-gate looking at the church.

Not long ago I went one Sunday evening to Westminster Cathedral. It was winter, and the streets of tall and sullen houses in that gloomy neighbourhood were darkening with fog. This fog crept slowly into the cathedral. The surpliced boy who presented an alms-dish just within the doors was stamping his feet and snuffling with cold. The leaves of tracts and pamphlets on the table blew up and chattered in the wind every time the door was thrust open.

The huge building was only half filled, perhaps hardly that. Through the fog it was not easy to see the glittering altar, and when three priests appeared before it their vestments so melted into the cloth that they were visible only when they bowed to the monstrance. The altar bell rang snappishly through this cold fog like the dinner bell of a boarding house, and in that yellow mist, which deepened with every minute, the white flames of the candles lost nearly all their starlike brightness. There seemed to be depression and resentment in the deep voices of the choir rumbling and rolling behind the screen; there seemed to be haste, a desire to get it over, in the nasal voice of the priest praying almost squeakily at the altar.

People were continually entering the cathedral, many of them having the appearance of foreigners, many of them young men who looked like waiters: one was struck by their reverence, and also by their look of intellectual apathy.

Father Knox appeared in the pulpit, which is stationed far down the nave, having come from his work of teaching at Ware to preach to the faithful at Westminster. He looked very young, and rather apprehensive, a slight boyish figure, swaying uneasily, the large luminous eyes, of an extraordinary intensity, almost glazed with light, the full lips, so obviously meant for laughter, parted with a nervous uncertainty, a wave of thick brown hair falling across the narrow forehead with a look of tiredness, the long slender hands never still for a moment.

I will endeavour to summarise his remarkable sermon, which was delivered through the fog in a soft and throaty voice, the body of the preacher swaying monotonously backward and forward, the congregation sitting back in its little chairs and coughing inconveniently from beginning to end. It was the strangest sermon I have listened to for many years, and all the stranger for its unimpassioned delivery. He spoke of the Fall of Man as a certainty. He spoke continually of an offended God. Between this offended God and His creature Man sin had dug an impassable chasm. But Christ had thrown a bridge, from heaven’s side of that chasm, over the dreadful gulf. This is why Christ described Himself as the Way. He is the Way over that chasm, and there is no other.

But Christ also described Himself as a door. What is the definition of a door? It is not enough to say that a door is a thing for letting people in and letting people out. It is a thing for letting some people in, and for shutting other people out.

To whom did Christ entrust the key of this door? To St. Peter-to the disciple who had denied Him thrice. What a marvellous choice! Would you have thought of doing that? Should I have thought of doing that? Would any theologian have invented such an idea? But that is what Christ did.

And ever since, St. Peter and his successors have held the keys of Heaven and Hell, with power to loose and bind. What? you exclaim, were the Keys of Heaven and Hell entrusted to even those Popes who lived sinful lives and brought disgrace on the name of religion? Yes. To them and to no others in their day. Whatever their lives may have been at other moments, when they were loosing and binding they were acting for St. Peter, who stood behind them, and behind St. Peter stood Jesus Christ.

Such in brief was the sermon delivered that Sunday evening to the faithful in Westminster Cathedral by one of the wittiest men now living and one of the cleverest young men who ever came down from Oxford with the assurance of a great career before them.

How is it that he has come to such a pass?

I feel that he is in part whistling to keep up his courage, but in chief forcing himself to utter an extreme of traditional belief in order to destroy the last vestige in his mind of a free intellectual existence. Auto-suggestion has a power of which we only begin to know the first movements.

The man who has said that he would not choose as the battleground of the Christian religion either “the credibility of Judges or the edibility of Jonah,” the man who is blest with an unusual sense of humour and intellectual subtlety of a rare order, is here found preaching a theology which is fast being rejected by the students of Barcelona and is being questioned even by the peasants of Ireland. What does it mean? Is it possible to understand such a perversion of mind?

His intellectual position, as he states it, is a simple one-for the present.

He asks us, Is Truth something which we are ordered to keep, or something which we are ordered to find?

Is our business holding the fort? Or is it looking for the Pole?

The traditionalist can say, “Here is the Truth, written down for you and me in black and white; I mean to keep it, and defend it from attack; will you rally round it? Will you help me?”

He shows you the modernist wandering in the wilderness of speculative theology looking for the Truth which the traditionalist, safe, warm, and secure of eternal life, keeps whole and undefiled in his fortress.

It is like a fairy tale.

How simple it sounds! But when Father Knox looks in the glass does he not see its staring fallacy?

Did he keep the Truth of his boyhood-the Truth of his father’s church? Did he not go outside the fortress of Evangelicalism and seek for Truth in the fortress of Anglo-Catholicism? And here again, did he not break faith, and once more seek Truth outside its walls? If Truth is not something to be found, how is it that he is not still in the house of his fathers?

Does he fail to see that this argument not merely explains but vindicates the rejection of Christ by the Jews? They had their tradition, a tradition of immemorial sanctity, perhaps the noblest tradition of any people in the world.

Does he not also see that it destroys the raison d’etre of the Christian missionary, and would reduce the whole world to a state of what Nietzsche called Chinaism and profound mediocrity?

Every religion in history, from the worship of Osiris, Serapis, and Mithras to the loathsome rites practised in the darkness of African forests, has been handed down as unquestionable truth commanding the loyalty of its disciples. What logic, what magic of holiness, could destroy a false religion if tradition is sacrosanct and all innovation of the devil?

The intellectual duty of a Christian, Father Knox lays it down, is “to resist the natural tendencies of his reason, and believe what he is told, just as he is expected to do what he is told, not what comes natural to him.”

Such a proposition provokes a smile, but in the case of this man it provokes a feeling of grief. I cannot bring myself to believe that he has yet found rest for his soul, or that he can so easily strangle the free existence of his mind. His present position fills me with pity, his future with apprehension.

He is one of the modestest of men, almost shrinking in his diffidence and nervous self-distrust, an under-graduate who is mildly excited about an ingenious line of reasoning, a wit who loves to play tricks with the subtlety of a curiously agile brain, a casuist who sees quickly the chinks in the armour of an adversary. But with all his boyishness, and charm, and humility, and engaging cleverness, there is a light in his eyes too feverish for peace of mind. I cannot prevent myself from thinking that his secession, which was something of a comedy to his friends, may prove something of a tragedy to him.

He seems to me one of the most pathetic examples I ever encountered of the ruin wrought by Fear. I think that the one motive of his life has been a constant terror of finding himself in the wrong. The door, which for Dr. Inge has no key, because it has no lock, is to Ronald Knox a door of terror which opens only to a single key-and a door which as surely shuts out from eternal life the soul that is wrong as the soul that is wicked. He must have certainty. He dare not contemplate the prospect of awaking one day to find his religious life “a ghastly mistake.”

At the cross roads there was for him no Good Shepherd, only the dark shadow of an offended God. He ran for safety, for certainty. Has he found them?

It may be that the last of his doubts will leave him, that the iron discipline of the Roman Church and the auto-suggestion of his own earnest passion for inward peace, may deliver him from all fear, all uneasiness, and that one day, forsaking the challenging sermon and the too violent assertion of the Catholic faith, he may find himself sitting down in great peace of mind and with a golden mellowness of spirit to write an Apologia pro Vita Sua more genial and less shallow than A Spiritual AEneid.

Such a book from his pen would lack, I think, the fine sweetness of Newman’s great work, but it might excel all other books of religious autobiography in charming wit and endearing good humour. The Church of Rome has caught in him neither a Newman nor a Manning. It has caught either a Sydney Smith or a Tartar.

He has too much humour to be a bigot, and too much humanity to be satisfied with a cell. For the moment he seems to embrace Original Sin, to fling his arms round the idea of an offended God, and to shout at the top of his voice that there is no violence to his reason and to his common sense which he cannot contemplate and most gladly accomplish, in the name of Tradition; but the pulses cool, the white heat of enthusiasm evaporates, fears take wing as we grow older, and whispers from the outer world of advancing and conquering men find their way into the oldest blockhouse ever built against the movements of thought.

“Science,” says Dr. Inge, “has been the slowly advancing Nemesis which has overtaken a barbarised and paganised Christianity. She has come with a winnowing fan in her hand, and she will not stop till she has thoroughly purged her floor.”

I am sure Ronald Knox was never meant to shut his eyes and stop his ears against this movement of truth, and I am almost sure that he will presently find it impossible not to look, and not to listen.

And then . . . what then?