That is why he surely has the right without any consideration for the dignity of churchy young men to box their ears if they question his outward respect for the Blessed Sacrament.  Even Our Lord found it necessary at least on one occasion to chase the buyers and sellers out of the Temple, and though it is not recorded that He boxed the ears of any Pharisee, it seems to me quite permissible to believe that He did!  He lashed them with scorn anyway.

To come back to Father Rowley, you know the great cry of the so-called Evangelical party “Jesus only”?  Well, Father Rowley has really managed to make out of what was becoming a sort of ecclesiastical party cry something that really is evangelical and at the same time Catholic.  These people are taught to make the Blessed Sacrament the central fact of their lives in a way that I venture to say no Welsh revivalist or Salvation Army captain has ever made Our Lord the central fact in the lives of his converts, because with the Blessed Sacrament continually before them, Which is Our Lord Jesus Christ, their conversion endures.  I could fill a book with stories of the wonderful behaviour of these poor souls.  The temptation is to say of a man like Father Rowley that he has such a natural spring of human charity flowing from his heart that by offering to the world a Christlike example he converts his flock.  Certainly he does give a Christlike example and undoubtedly that must have a great influence on his people; but he does not believe, and I don’t believe, that a Christlike example is of any use without Christ, and he gives them Christ.  Even the Bishop of Silchester had to admit the other day that Vespers of the Blessed Sacrament as held at St. Agnes’ is a perfectly scriptural service.  Father Rowley makes of the Blessed Sacrament Christ Himself, so that the poor people may flock round Him.  He does not go round arguing with them, persuading them, but in the crises of their lives, as the answer to every question, as the solution of every difficulty and doubt, as the consolation in every sorrow, he offers them the Blessed Sacrament.  All his prayers (and he makes a great use of extempore prayer, much to the annoyance of the Bishop, who considers it ungrammatical), all his sermons, all his actions revolve round that one great fact.  “Jesus Christ is what you need,” he says, “and Jesus Christ is here in your church, here upon your altar.”

You can’t go into the little church without finding fifty people praying before the Blessed Sacrament.  The other day when the “King Harry” was sunk by the “Trafalgar,” the people here subscribed I forget how many pounds for the widows and children of the bluejackets and marines of the Mission who were drowned, and when it was finished and the subscription list was closed, they subscribed all over again to erect an altar at which to say Masses for the dead.  And the old women living in Father Rowley’s free houses that were once brothels gave up their summer