At the conclusion of one of his celebrations abroad, an Englishman in the congregation exclaimed, “Thank God that’s over.”  After his first sermon in Trinity Chapel, an undergraduate ("afterwards not only my friend but my penitent”) was heard to declare excitedly: 

“Such fun!  The new Fellow’s been preaching heresy—­all about Transubstantiation.”

Such fun!  This note runs through the whole of A Spiritual AEneid.  A thoroughly undergraduate spirit inspires every page save the last.  Religion is treated as a lark.  It is full of opportunities for plotting and ragging and pulling the episcopal leg.  One is never conscious, not for a single moment, that the author is writing about Jesus of Nazareth, Gethsemane, and Calvary.  About a Church, yes; about ceremonial, about mysterious rites, about prayers to the Virgin Mary, about authority, and about bishops; yes, indeed; but about Christ’s transvaluation of values, about His secret, about His religion of the pure heart and the childlike spirit, not one single glimpse.

Now let us examine his intellectual position.

In the preface to Some Loose Stones[7], written before he went over to
Rome, he explains his position to the modernist: 

     . . . there are limits defined by authority, within which theorising
     is unnecessary and speculation forbidden.

     But I should like here to enter a protest against the assumption
     . . . that the obscurantist, having fenced himself in behind his wall
     of prejudices, enjoys an uninterrupted and ignoble peace.

The soldier who has betaken himself to a fortress is thereby in a more secure position than the soldier who elects to fight in the open plain.  He has ramparts to defend him.  But he has, on the other hand, ramparts to defend. . . .  For him there is no retreat.

     The whole position stands or falls by the weakest parts in the
     defences; give up one article of the Nicene Creed, and the whole
     situation is lost; you go under, and the flag you loved is forfeit.

[Footnote 7:  An answer to the volume called Foundations.]

And yet: 

I can feel every argument against the authenticity of the Gospels, because I know that if I approached them myself without faith I should as likely as not brush them aside impatiently as one of a whole set of fables.

They would be fables to him unless he approached them with faith.  And what is faith?  He tells us in the same preface:  “Faith is to me, not an intellectual process, but a divine gift, a special privilege.”

It is fair to say that he would now modify this definition, for he has told me that it is a heresy to exclude from faith the operations of the intellect.  But the words were written when he was fighting the battle of the soul, written almost on the same page as that which bears these words: