Might he not perhaps say with another great man, “What must God be if He is pleased by things which simply displease His educated creatures?” In a country where the churches were once far more crowded than in Belgium, I was told by a discerning man, Prince Alexis Obolensky, a former Procurator of the Holy Synod, that all such devotion is simply superstition.  He said he would gladly give me all Russia’s spirituality if I could give him a tenth of England’s moral earnestness.  And he told me this story: 

A man set out one winter’s night to murder an old woman in her cottage.  As he tramped through the snow with the hatchet under his blouse, it suddenly occurred to him that it was a Saint’s Day.  Instantly he dropped on his knees in the snow, crossed himself violently with trembling hands, and in a guilty voice implored God to forgive him for his evil intention.  Then he rose up, refreshed and forgiven, postponing the murder till the next night.

Undoubtedly, I fear, the devotion of priest-ridden countries, which evokes so spectacular an effect on the stranger of unbalanced judgment, is largely a matter of superstition; how many prayers are inspired by a lottery, how many candles lighted by fear of a ghost?

But Father Knox, whose aesthetic nature had early responded with a vital impulse to Gothic architecture and the pomp and mystery of priestly ceremonial, felt in Bruges that the spirit of the Chapel of the Sacred Blood must be introduced into the Church of England “to save our country from lapsing into heathenism.”  What, I wonder, is his definition of that term, heathenism?

Bruges had a decisive effect, not only on his aesthetic impulses, but on his moral sense.  His conduct as an Anglican priest was frankly that of a Roman propagandist.  I do not know that any words more damning to the Romish spirit have ever been written than those in which this most charming and brilliant young man tells the story of his treachery to the Anglican Church.  Of celebrating the Communion service he says: 

     . . . my own principle was, whenever I spoke aloud, to use the
     language of the Prayer Book, when I spoke secreto, to use the
     words ordered by the Latin missal.

He said of his propaganda work at this time: 

     The Roman Catholics . . . have to serenade the British public from
     the drive; we Anglican Catholics have the entree to the
     drawing-room.

His enthusiasm for the Roman service was such that in one place

I had to travel for three quarters of an hour to find a church where my manner of celebrating, then perhaps more reminiscent of the missal than of the Prayer Book, was tolerated even in a Mass of Devotion.

     About this time I celebrated at a community chapel.  One of the
     brethren was heard to declare afterwards that if he had known what
     I was going to do he would have got up and stopped me.