59

To the Same

June 10, 1908.

I have so often thought of you and wondered how you were getting on. I can sympathise with you so much, as I have been through the same tangle myself. The nearer one gets to the City of God the more intricate and perplexing the many cross-roads and turnings become-till in a moment the road lies out clear and straight, and the City stands out before one's eyes with its wide open gates of welcome. Please God you will see it soon.

60

To the Same

June 20, 1908.

I have been out of town for two nights, and got both of your letters this afternoon. I wish so much I could help you. I never intended or thought that your coming here for a week or two should in any way commit you to anything. I meant that you should go more into the Roman point of view, and hear all I have to say in explaining the doctrines, etc. Nor should I, I think, be even disappointed if you went away and said you could come to no conclusion at present. One person came to me for more than a year, and though she was ready to be received I did not think she was ready and refused to receive her, and she went to India, and I don't think she is yet a Catholic, and that was four or five years ago. We cannot hurry ourselves, and I took too long myself to feel inclined to hurry anyone. Only I beg you not to commit yourself to

Anglicanism till you feel at least certain that you are right in doing so; don't do it in despair of ever being able to become a Catholic. After all, you are not a member of the English Church, and to join it now after all these years is a very different thing from going on in it if you had never abandoned it. It must mean to you a kind of adult and deliberate confession of faith in it. What I am afraid of, if you were to join the English Church, is this, that you would feel for a time comfort and help from the very goodness of the people you would be thrown with, but that before long the anomaly and unreasonableness of the position would begin to disturb you, and you would have to go through all this worry again. Don't take any step till you feel both spiritually and intellectually clear that you are right. One must-to find a permanent restingplace-feel clear as to the intellectual grounds of one's faith in a system to which one commits oneself. Better to wait any time than to act before one knows that one's intellect is not resting on an insecure foundation which in the long run must upset one's faith. I feel for you so much, and understand all you are going through. I have been through so much the same thing myself; but if you are patient a conviction certain, clear, and overpowering will come to you: This is the way, walk in it.' Till you get that conviction you can but wait, and offer your waiting in suffering to God, in atonement for any fault of your own through which you may in the past have lost your faith. Come up in July if you feel it would be any help. I will be only too glad to do anything in my power to help you, and you need not fear that I will either hurry you or expect any immediate result. You said you felt more strongly the claims of Rome than of the English Church; if so, how can you join the English Church, or rejoin it with mature judgment and deliberate consent? Don't be deceived

by the argument that in becoming a Catholic you leave the Church of your baptism. You were baptized in the Church of Christ, the Church He founded; you could not be baptized into anything else, and having drifted from the English Church you now desire to right yourself by outward act with that Church into which you were baptized whatever it may be-Anglicanism, the Roman, or Methodist. When I first saw you, you told me you were an Agnostic, not an Anglican; you don't slip back into Anglicanism because you believe now in God. Anglicanism is a system, and you must believe in that system before you reunite yourself with it, and I don't myself believe that if you realise this you can do it ?

God bless you, my dear child, and lead you into all truth.

61

To the Same

January 25, 1909.

It was a great happiness to me to see and feel that you seemed already so much at home and at peace in the Church, especially with so little external help, but that even is not without its advantages, and perhaps a good thing to begin with; it throws one upon oneself and on God, and it is curious how, standing almost alone, one can feel the great atmosphere of the Church breathing around one, and filling one with its bracing air. The air, alas, is not always so bracing when one breathes it in company with a certain type of Catholic, who seems to have the power of expelling or exhausting or destroying its oxygen, and making it rather stifling and heavy! My great friend St. Paul after his conversion went off into solitude for about three years! The result of which is probably seen in the Epistles

M

to the Romans and the Ephesians! So we may have something good from you later on!

62

To the Same

August 1, 1909.

Very many happy returns of to-day, and may each year bring you some new blessing and deeper knowledge of God, and of His will for you. I feel somehow that He has some purpose for you and that this is just a time of preparation and rest, a breathing time to get ready. I think the way you have been at once thrown upon yourself, as soon as you became a Catholic, so far from a Church and so isolated from religious sympathy, is in many ways a very good thing, and tests and develops your convictions and your character. It's very hard I know, but I think later on you will not regret it. After all, so far as each one of us is concerned, the Church, with all its organisation and many helps and attractions, exists only to help us to know and love God and to get nearer to Him. Even though you see and feel so little of it around you, you are a citizen of that great City and bear about with you its freedom, its breadth, and its power, and perhaps a person who is very isolated religiously may feel all this more than others, as an Englishman might feel in some other land the greatness of being an Englishman. At any rate, I feel sure that God is preparing you for something. And when the door opens, and the call comes,' they that were ready went in and the door was shut '-shut against the unprepared, and shut protecting those who entered in.

The next letter is undated. It was written to an

Anglican clergyman who had asked Father Maturin's advice, and deals chiefly with the question of corporate re-union.

63

As to your letter, I will answer you quite candidly what you have asked me, as I suppose you would wish me to do. And let me say, first, that I am not a controversial person, and have a great interest naturally in all that is going on in the Church of England, and can view it all with greater calmness, as not being disturbed by the inconsistencies which troubled me so much when I was in it. May I say first of all, that I cannot understand how any one who is convinced that the claims of the party to which you belong, and I did belong, cannot be upheld, can remain on with a view to a corporate movement. If ever there is a corporate movement to Rome, it will be due largely to the individuals who have already gone and led the way. But I cannot see exactly what a corporate movement means when it comes to a question of truth and untruth, right and wrong. I suppose people arrive at their convictions in different ways and with different degrees of certainty. But how could you or I go on receiving Communion and ministering in the English Church after we became convinced that any body of Christians not in union with the Holy See is in schism, in order to wait for others? To my mind, there are two states of mind that are apt to be confounded-one is a loss of faith in the possibility of the English Church ever being able to recover itself— a despair of the whole position-the other is an absolute conviction that, quite regardless of anything else, the claims of Rome are right-Rome is the Church, Now, no amount of mere Anglican anomalies could justify