The accident of his having to speak at this Congress, where he was received with enormous enthusiasm, probably led to a fuller analysis of this element in his thought. I put here a letter he wrote to Maurice Baring soon after his conversion, because it sums up the Anglican question as he finally saw it:
Feb. 14th, 1923
Please forgive me for the delay; but I have been caught in a cataract of letters and work in connection with the new paper we are trying to start; and am now dictating this under conditions that make it impossible for it to resemble anything so personal and intimate as the great unwritten epistle to which you refer. But I will note down here very hurriedly and in a more impersonal way, some of the matters that have affected me in relation to the great problem.
To begin with, I am shy of giving one of my deepest reasons because it is hard to put it without offence, and I am sure it is the wrong method to offend the wavering Anglo-Catholic. But I believe one of my strongest motives was mixed up with the idea of honour. I feel there is something mean about not making complete confession and restitution after a historic error and slander. It is not the same thing to withdraw the charges against Rome one by one, or restore the traditions to Canterbury one by one. Suppose a young prig refuses to live with his father or his friend or his wife, because wine is drunk in the house or there are Greek statues in the hall. Suppose he goes off on his own and develops broader ideas. On the day he drinks his first glass of wine, I think it is essential to his honour that he should go back to his father or his friend and say, "You are right and I was wrong, and we will drink wine together." It is not consonant with his honour that he should set up a house of his own with wine and statues and every parallel particular, and still treat the other as if he were in the wrong. That is mean because it is making the best of both; it is combining the advantages of being right with the advantages of having been wrong. Any analogy is imperfect; but I think you see what I mean.
The larger version of this is that England has really got into so wrong a state, with its plutocracy and neglected populace and materialistic and Servile morality, that it must take a sharp turn that will be a sensational turn. No evolution into Catholicism will have that moral effect. Christianity is the religion of repentance; it stands against modern fatalism and pessimistic futurism mainly in saying that a man can go back. If we do decidedly go back it will show that religion is alive. For the rest, I do not say much about the details of continuity and succession, because the truth is they did not much affect me. What I see is that we cannot complain of England suffering from being Protestant and at the same time claim that she has always been Catholic. That there has always been a High Church Party is true; that there has always been an Anglo-Catholic Party may be true, but I am not so sure of it. But there is one matter arising from that which I do think important. Even the High Church Party, even the Anglo-Catholic Party only confronts a particular heresy called Protestantism upon particular points. It defends ritual rightly or even sacramentalism rightly, because these are the things the Puritans attacked. If it is not the heresy of an age, at least it is only the anti-heresy of an age. But since I have been a Catholic, I have become conscious of being in a much vaster arsenal, full of arms against countless other potential enemies. The Church, as the Church and not merely as ordinary opinion, has something to say to philosophies which the merely High Church has never had occasion to think about. If the next movement is the very reverse of Protestantism, the Church will have something to say about it; or rather has already something to say about it. You might unite all High Churchmen on the High Church quarrel, but what authority is to unite them when the devil declares his next war on the world?
Another quality that impresses me is the power of being decisive first and being proved right afterwards. This is exactly the quality a supernatural power would have; and I know nothing else in modern religion that has it. For instance, there was a time when I should have thought psychical enquiry the most reasonable thing in the world, and rather favourable to religion. I was afterwards convinced, by experience and not merely faith, that spiritualism is a practical poison. Don't people see that when that is found in experience, a prodigious prestige accrues to the authority which, long before the experiment, did not pretend to enquire but simply said, "Drop it." We feel that the authority did not discover; it knew. There are a hundred other things of which that story is true, in my own experience. But the High Churchman has a perfect right to be a spiritualistic enquirer; only he has not a right to claim that his authority knew beforehand the truth about spiritualistic enquiry.
Of course there are a hundred things more to say; indeed the greatest argument for Catholicism is exactly what makes it so hard to argue for it. It is the scale and multiplicity of the forms of truth and help that it has to offer. And perhaps, after all, the only thing that you and I can really say with profit is exactly what you yourself suggested; that we are men who have talked to a good many men about a good many things, and seen something of the world and the philosophies of the world and that we have not the shadow of a doubt about what was the wisest act of our lives.
This letter, as we have seen, was written afterwards. Meanwhile the story of the last slow but by no means uncertain steps is best told in a series of undated letters to Father Ronald Knox:
DEAR FATHER KNOX,
It is hard not to have a silly feeling that demons, in the form of circumstances, get in the way of what concerns one most, and I have been distracted with details for which I have to be responsible, in connection with the New Witness, which is in a crisis about which shareholders etc. have to be consulted. I can't let my brother's paper, that stands for all he believed in, go without doing all I can; and I am trying to get it started again, with Belloc to run it if possible. But the matter of our meeting has got into every chink of my thoughts, even the pauses of talk on practical things. I could not explain myself at that meeting; and I want to try again now.