animals afterwards. Religious defences must yield
before the pressure of the more original instinct,
unless, indeed, hers was a merely sexual conscience.
The lowest forms of Anglicanism are reduced to perceiving
conscience nowhere except in sex. The Catholic
was more concerned with matters of faith. Not
in France, Italy or Spain did Catholicism enter so
largely into the private life of the individual as
it did in England. The foreign, or to be more
exact, the native Catholic had worn the yoke till
it fitted loose on his shoulders. His was a more
eclectic Christianity; he took what suited him and
left the rest. But in England Romanism had never
shaken itself free from the Anglican conscience.
The convert never acquired the humanities of Rome,
and in addition the lover had to contend against the
confessional. But in Evelyn’s case he could
set against the confessional the delirium of success,
the joy of art, the passion of emulation, jealousy
and ambition, and last, but far from least, the ache
of her own passionate body. Remembering the fear
and humility with which he had been used to approach
the priest, and the terror of eternal fire in which
he had waited for him to pronounce absolution, Owen
paused to think how far such belief was from him now.
Yet he had once believed—in a way.
He wondered at the survival of such a belief in the
nineteenth century, and asked himself if confession
were not inveterate in man. The artist in his
studio, the writer in his study, strive to tell their
soul’s secret; the peasant throws himself at
the feet of the priest, for, like them, he would unburden
himself of that terrible weight of inwardness which
is man. Is not the most mendacious mistress often
taken with the desire of confession ... the wish to
reveal herself? Upon this bed rock of human nature
the confessional has been built. And Owen admired
the humanity of Rome. Rome was terribly human.
No Church, he reflected, was so human. Her doctrine
may seem at times quaint, medieval, even gross, but
when tested by the only test that can be applied,
power to reach to human needs, and administer consolation
to the greatest number, the most obtuse-minded cannot
fail to see that Rome easily distances her rivals.
Her dogma and ceremonial are alike conceived in extraordinary
sympathy with man’s common nature....
Our lives are enveloped in mystery, the scientist
concedes that, and the woof of which the stuff of
life is woven is shot through with many a thread of
unknown origin, untraceable to any earthly shuttle.
There is a mystery, and in the elucidation of that
mystery man never tires; the Sovereign Pontiff and
the humblest crystal gazer are engaged in the same
adventure. The mystery is so intense, and lives
so intimately in all, that Rome dared to come forward
with a complete explanation. And her necessarily
perfunctory explanation she drapes in a ritual so
magnificent, that even the philosopher ceases to question,
and pauses abashed by the grandeur of the symbolism.
High Mass in its own home, under the arches of a Gothic
cathedral, appealed alike to the loftiest and humblest
intelligence. Owen paused to think if there was
not something vulgar in the parade of the Mass.
A simple prayer breathed by a burdened heart in secret
awaked a more immediate and intimate response in him.
That was Anglicanism. Perhaps he preferred Anglicanism.
The truth was, he was deficient in the religious instinct.