“What between the Roman party in the Anglican Church and the Anglican party in the Roman Church,” said Mark, “It seems a pity that some kind of reunion cannot be effected.”

“So it could,” Monseigneur declared.  “So it could, if it wasn’t for the Irish.  Look at the way we treat our English converts.  The clergy, I mean.  Why?  Because the Irish do not want England to be converted.”

Mark did not raise with Monseigneur Cripps the question of his doubts.  Indeed, before the plaice had been taken away he had decided that they no longer existed.  It became clear to him that the English Church was England; and although he knew in his heart that Monseigneur Cripps was suffering from a sense of grievance and that his criticism of Roman policy was too obviously biased, it pleased him to believe that it was a fair criticism.

Mark thanked Monseigneur Cripps for his hospitality and took a friendly leave of him.  An hour later he was walking back through the pleasant vale of Wield toward the Cotswolds.  As he went his way among the green orchards, he thought over his late impulse to change allegiance, marvelling at it now and considering it irrational, like one astonished at his own behaviour in a dream.  There came into his mind a story of George Fox who drawing near to the city of Lichfield took off his shoes in a meadow and cried three times in a loud voice “Woe unto the bloody city of Lichfield,” after which he put on his shoes again and proceeded into the town.  Mark looked back in amazement at his lunch with Monseigneur Cripps and his own meditated apostasy.  To his present mood that intention to forsake his own Church appeared as remote from actuality as the malediction of George Fox upon the city of Lichfield.

Here among these green orchards in the heart of England Roman Catholicism presented itself to Mark’s imagination as an exotic.  The two words “Roman Catholicism” uttered aloud in the quiet June sunlight gave him the sensation of an allamanda or of a gardenia blossoming in an apple-tree.  People who talked about bringing the English Church into line with the trend of Western Christianity lacked a sense of history.  Apart from the question whether the English Church before the Reformation had accepted the pretensions of the Papacy, it was absurd to suppose that contemporary Romanism had anything in common with English Catholicism of the early sixteenth century.  English Catholicism long before the Reformation had been a Protestant Catholicism, always in revolt against Roman claims, always preserving its insularity.  It was idle to question the Catholic intentions of a priesthood that could produce within a century of the Reformation such prelates as Andrews and Ken.  It was ridiculous at the prompting of the party in the ascendancy at Westminster to procure a Papal decision against English Orders when two hundred and fifty years ago there was a cardinal’s hat waiting for Laud if he would leave the Church of England.  And what about Paul IV and Elizabeth?  Was he not willing to recognize English Orders if she would recognize his headship of Christendom?