“Ah,” said Father Payne, “I think that is more touching still.  The people who change their religion, as it is called,—­there is something extremely captivating about them as a rule.  To want to change your form of religion simply means that you are unhappy and uneasy.  You want more beauty, or more assurance, or more sympathy, or more antiquity.  Have you never noticed how all converts personify their new Church in feminine terms?  She becomes a Madonna, something at once motherly and young.  It is the passion with which the child turns away from what is male and rough, to the mother, the nurse, the elder sister.  The convert isn’t really in search of dogmas and doctrines:  he is in love with a presence, a shape, something which can clasp and embrace and love him.  I don’t feel any real doubt of that.  The man who turns away to some other form of faith wants a home.  He sees the ugliness, the spite, the malice, the contentiousness of his own Church.  He loathes the hardness and uncharitableness of it; he is like a boy at school sick for home.  To me Newman’s logic is like the effort of a man desperately constructing a bridge to escape to the other side of the river.  The land beyond is like a landscape seen from a hill, a scene of woods and waters, of fields and hamlets—­everything seems peaceful and idyllic there.  He wants the wings of a dove, to flee away and be at rest.  It is the same feeling which makes people wish to travel.  When you travel, the new land is a spectacular thing—­it is all a picture.  It is not that you crave to live in a foreign land:  you merely want the luxury of seeing life without living life.  No ordinary person goes to live in Italy because he has studied the political constitution and organisation of Italy, and prefers it to that of England.  So, too, the charm of a religious conversion is that it doesn’t seem unpatriotic to do it—­but you get the feel of a new country without having to quit your own.  And the essence of it is a flight from conditions which you dread and dislike.  Of course Newman does not describe it so—­that is all a part of his guilelessness—­he speaks of the shadow of a hand upon the wall:  but I don’t doubt that his subconscious mind thrilled with the sense of a possible escape that way.  His heart was converted long before his mind.  What he hated in the English Church was having to decide for himself—­he wanted to lean on something, to put himself inside a stronghold:  he wanted to obey.  Some people dislike the way in which he made himself obey,—­the way he argued himself into holding things which were frankly irrational.  But I don’t mind that!  It is the pleasure of the child in being told what to do instead of having to amuse itself.”