When we are ever to reach home I cannot say. We have already been fourteen days at sea and have not yet reached our port. Sicily is in sight, and I trust we may very soon reach Messina. If not we shall be starved! The steward solemnly tells us we have bread for only three days longer, and that the stores are almost all consumed.
Of our party, I think I may say that Lady Loudoun, Miss Eden, and the doctor are the worse for their visit to Jerusalem. They had the misfortune to make acquaintance with people, calling themselves religious, whose delight seems to be to deny the authenticity of every single sacred site. The result has been, as might have been expected, a semi-disbelief in everything.
I think, on the other hand, the pilgrimage has been very advantageous to Bute. It has helped him to gather up his thoughts and prepare for action and the work of his life. He has kindly appointed me his chaplain. I am not to live at either of his houses, but to be ready when needed to go to him and to travel with him. I cannot but feel that this arrangement (which is entirely his own idea) will allow me to do much more good than if I were settled in any one spot. I hope it may turn to the advantage of my soul and to God's glory.
1869, Early Catholic experiences
Bute left his yacht at Marseilles (his companions continuing the voyage to England by Gibraltar and the Bay of Biscay), and repaired to Paris, to complete his pilgrimage by a visit of devotion and thanksgiving to the famous shrine of Our Lady of Victories. On returning home he went to Cardiff, and thence he wrote, later in the year, some account of himself and his doings in a long and interesting letter to his faithful friend at Oxford.
Cardiff Castle,
November 5, 1869.
MY DEAR MISS SKENE,
During the past year I have had several kind letters from you, which have gone unanswered. Before me lie the three first pages of a letter to you dated October 1, but never finished. I had at that time only just received your last, as I had been away from home for some months, and had skilfully concealed my addresses from every one, lest any letters (mine are almost invariably business or beggars) should follow and find me out.
The first thing you will want to know is how I am getting on in the Church. I don't remember whether I ever wrote to you from Nice or not; but that, if I had, could only have been so soon after my reception as to make it almost valueless. I have not been received a year, so I suppose what I say now is not worth very much. I am, thank God, very comfortable. I had, no doubt, a first flush of fervour and enthusiasm, but that soon passed away, and I became almost immediately quite a humdrum Catholic. The practices, as you know, were already familiar to me; and I knew also a great many, if not all, of the practical drawbacks, of which florid figured music and appropriated and paid-for sittings in church are (to me) the most distasteful. Florid forms of devotion and piety have never appealed to me any more than florid music; and in that respect I am (so I am told) considered like the slowest type of old English Catholicism. The old-fashioned "Garden of the Soul" is my book, except when visiting some very holy shrine, when I find myself able to use occasionally the "Prayers of St. Gertrude," or at least some of them.
I am perfectly at peace in the Church, and have been. My taste for controversy has gone, and for theological inquiry also, to great extent. I think that when one has once entered the Church—well, one has jumped over the cliff and reached the bottom, safe and sound it is true, but in a condition that renders restlessness impossible and controversy absolutely superfluous.