FATHER KNOX
CHAPTER III
FATHER KNOX
Our new curate preached, a pretty hopefull young man, yet somewhat raw, newly come from college, full of Latine sentences, which in time will weare off.—JOHN EVELYN.
There is a story that when Father Knox was an undergraduate at Oxford he sat down one day to choose whether he would be an agnostic or a Roman Catholic. "But is there not some doubt in the matter?" inquired a friend of mine, to whom I repeated the tale. "Did he really sit down and choose, or did he only toss up?"
The story, of course, is untrue. It has its origin in the delightful wit and brilliant playfulness of the young priest. Everybody loves him, and nobody takes him seriously.
Few men of his intellectual stature have been received with so little trumpet-blowing into the Roman Catholic Church, and none at all, I think, has so imperceptibly retired from the Church of England. For all the interest it excited, the secession of this extremely brilliant person might have been the secession of a sacristan or a pew-opener. He did not so much "go over to Rome" as sidle away from the Church of England.