Bruges had a decisive effect, not only on his æsthetic 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 entrée 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.
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 Æneid. 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.