Confessions Of A Convert

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The publisher of this book utilises modern printing technologies as well as photocopying processes for reprinting and preserving rare works of literature that are out-of-print or on the verge of becoming lost. This book is one such reprint. Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill § 1. It will be impossible for me ever to acknowledge adequately the debt of gratitude which I owe to the Community of the Resurrection, or the admiration which I always felt, and still feel, toward their method and spirit. All that it is possible to describe is the external aspect of their life and to hint only at the deep Christian charity and brotherli- ness and devotion that existed beneath it. It is true that they will not allow me to go and stay with them again as I should like to do, but individually, they are all most friendly, and, indeed such a visit might perhaps be really painful to them. At the same time one must reflect that for an Anglican to become a Catholic is, even from the point of view of his old friends, a very different thing from the opposite process. For when a Catholic leaves the Church, those from whom he separates himself regard him as one who has left the Fold of Christ for the wilderness. It does not at all signify to what other body he may attach himself: he has left what his friends hold to be the One Body of Christ. Butwhen a High Churchman becomes a Catholic, on the Anglican theory all that he has done is to have transferred himself from one part of the Church to another; on the "Branch" theory, he has only shifted from one bough to the other; on the "Province" theory, to use yet more recent phraseology, he has only detached himself from Canterbury, not from the Church of Christ, as Anglicans understand it. It is true that he has, to their mind, become "schismatic"; worse, he has denied the validity of the Orders he once accepted; but it is impossible for his friends to regard him as an apostate in the simple sense of the word, and, to do them justice, they very seldom ever pretend do so. Certainly the Mirfield Brethren have never manifeste...

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