In Constantinople he is impressed with the folly of patching up the Anglican succession by an alliance with the Greek Church. "Depend upon it," he writes, "cast about as we will, if we want foreign Catholic sympathies, we must find them as they will let us in our Latin mother." He witnesses a procession of pilgrims from Vienna to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin at Mariazell. "It was a bewildering sight. I thought how faith ran in my own country in thin and scattered rivulets, and I looked with envious surprise at this huge wave which the Austrian capital had flung upon this green platform of Styrian highland—a wave of pure, hearty, earnest faith." He is indignant at the desecration of Sunday by the Lutheran population of Dresden, and exclaims, "Yet year after year are we assured in England of the connection between popery and whatever is disagreeable in the foreign way of keeping Sunday. No person who has not been abroad, and heard and seen and investigated for himself, would credit the extensive system of lying pursued by English travel-writers, religious-tract compilers, and Exeter Hall speech-makers, respecting the Roman Church abroad; and whether the lies be those of wilfulness or of prejudice, ignorance, and indolence, I do not see much to distinguish in the guilt. These dirt-seekers scrape the sewers of Europe to rough-cast the Church of Rome with the plentiful defilements."
Soon after his return home, he was offered the college living of Elton, in Huntingdonshire, and at first declined it, but afterward, for a reason which curiously illustrates his conscientiousness, he determined to accept. "My chief rock of offence," said he, "is the subduing the poet to the priest." He would have given up poetry altogether, but Keble convinced him that he had no right to bury his chief talent in a napkin. To cultivate it in moderation was more difficult, and here he thought the uncongenial duties of the pastoral office would be a great help in correcting his inordinate love of literature, and keeping him within the bounds of usefulness. "I do not say you are wrong," was Wordsworth's remark on hearing his determination; "but England loses a poet."
If his reason for accepting the rectory was a strange one, his first step on taking possession was still stranger and still wiser. He determined to visit Rome and study the method pursued by the church in dealing with the souls committed to her care. "I want to go to Italy," said he, "not as a poet, or a tourist, or a pleased dreamer, but as a pilgrim who regards it as a second Palestine, the Holy Land of the West." Dr. Wiseman, then coadjutor bishop of the central district of England, gave him letters of introduction to Cardinal Acton and Dr. Grant at Rome, so that he was enabled to see much more of the charitable and religious institutions of the Christian capital than falls to the lot of the ordinary visitor. He studied Italian, in order that he might understand the numerous lives of saints in that language, and singularly enough, or providentially we should rather say, he conceived a particular devotion to St. Philip Neri, his future father. Of his visit to the room in which the saint used to say Mass he writes, "How little did I, a Protestant stranger in that room years ago, dream that I should ever be of the saint's family, or that the Oratorian father who showed it me should in a few years be appointed by the pope the novice-master of the English Oratorians. I remember how, when he kissed the glass of the case in which St. Philip's little bed is kept as a relic, he apologized to me as a Protestant, lest I should be scandalized, and told me with a smile how tenderly St. Philip's children loved their father. I was not scandalized with their relic-worship then, but I can understand better now what he said about the love, the child-like love, wherewith St. Philip inspired his sons. If any one had told me that in seven short years I should wear the same habit, and the same white collar in the streets of London, and be preaching a triduo in honor of Rome's apostle, I should have wondered how any one could dream so wild a dream."
Sensibly as he was affected by the pious practices and associations of Rome, his attachment to the Church of England was as yet unshaken. He still cherished the delusion that some way could be found of connecting the Anglican establishment with this venerable apostolic church. Controversy on such points of doctrine as indulgences, etc., he put aside. "The one thing necessary to prove," said he, "is that adherence to the holy see is essential to the being of a church: to the well-being of all churches I admit it essential." He visited the church of the Lateran on St. John's day, and knelt bare-headed in the piazza to receive the holy father's blessing. "I do not think," he writes, "I ever returned from any service so thoroughly christianized in every joint and limb, or so right of heart, as I did from the Lateran on Thursday." Afterward Cardinal Acton obtained for him the favor of a private audience with Pope Gregory XVI., the story of which he tells in the following words:
"The Rector of the English College accompanied me, and told me that, as Protestants did not like kissing the pope's foot, I should not be required to do it. We waited in the lobby of the Vatican library for half an hour, when the pope arrived, and a prelate opened the door, remaining outside. The pope was perfectly alone, without a courtier or prelate, standing in the middle of the library, in a plain white cassock, and a white silk skull-cap, (white is the papal color.) On entering, I knelt down, and again when a few yards from him, and lastly before him; he held out his hand, but I kissed his foot; there seemed to be a mean puerility in refusing the customary homage. With Dr. Baggs for interpreter, we had a long conversation; he spoke of Dr. Pusey's suspension for defending the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist with amazement and disgust; he said to me, 'You must not mislead yourself in wishing for unity, yet waiting for your church to move. Think of the salvation of your own soul.' I said I feared self-will and individual judging. He said, 'You are all individuals in the English church; you have only external communion and the accident of being all under the queen. You know this; you know all doctrines are taught amongst you, any how. You have good wishes; may God strengthen them! You must think for yourself and for your soul.' He then laid his hands on my shoulders, and I immediately knelt down; upon which he laid them on my head, and said, 'May the grace of God correspond to your good wishes and deliver you from the nets (insidie) of Anglicanism, and bring you to the true holy church!' I left him almost in tears, affected as much by the earnest, affectionate demeanor of the old man as by his blessing and his prayer. I shall remember St. Alban's day in 1843 to my life's end."
That he did not immediately embrace the truth seems to have been not the effect of cowardice, but of a genuine scruple such as he expressed to Pope Gregory. The Anglican party at this time were sanguine of their ability to bring their members, as a body, into communion with the Roman see, and Mr. Faber was doubtless conscientious in his delay, though he suffered terribly from distress of mind. "I grow more Roman every day," he writes. "I hardly dare read the Articles; their weight grows heavier on me daily. I hope our Blessed Lady's intercession may not cease for any of us because we do not seek it, since we desist for obedience' sake." He prayed at the shrine of St. Aloysius on the feast of that saint, and left the church as if speechless and not knowing where he was going. After he became a Catholic, he told Dr. Grant that on the 21st of June St. Aloysius "had always knocked very hard at his heart." Twice he took his hat to go to the English College and make his abjuration, but on each occasion some trifling circumstance interfered to prevent the execution of his purpose. He wore a miraculous medal, and he obtained some rosaries blessed by the pope. At last he went home to Elton, having suffered during his visit a degree of mental anguish which actually resulted in physical injuries that affected him all the rest of his life.
Dr. Newman's state of mind was very much like Mr. Faber's at this time. The two friends wrote to each other, and agreed to delay their final decision for a little while longer; and in the mean time Mr. Faber threw all his energy into his parochial duties, endeavoring to copy the methods of pastoral labor which he had gone to Rome to study. His parish was disorderly in consequence of long neglect, and what religious vitality there was in the place was found principally at the dissenting chapel. Mr. Faber relied for reformation upon preaching, and what he considered the sacraments. He cared very little for ceremonies and vestments, and compared those who would now be called ritualists to "grown-up children playing at mass, putting ornament before truth, suffocating the inward by the outward." "This is not the way to become Catholic again; it is only a profaner kind of Protestantism than any we have seen hitherto." When the surplice controversy was agitating the Established Church, he told his congregation that he usually preached in a surplice because he preferred it, but he "would preach in his shirt-sleeves if it would be any satisfaction to them." He tried to establish the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus; he published three tracts on examination of conscience; he introduced confessions, and out of the most promising of his young male penitents he formed a confraternity which used to meet at the rectory every night about twelve o'clock and spend an hour in prayer. On the vigils of great festivals, their devotions lasted two or three hours. On these nights, and also on Fridays and every night in Lent, the whole party used the discipline, each in turn receiving it from the others.
These devotional practices seem to have excited the powers of darkness; for it is related that many times while the brotherhood were assembled, mysterious disturbances were heard, often apparently just outside the door of the oratory. The house was searched with lights, but nothing was ever discovered which could account for the noises.
On Sunday afternoons, the rectory grounds were thrown open to the parish, and the clergyman mingled freely with his flock, while games of foot-ball and cricket were introduced to make the gatherings more attractive. Of course the Sabbatarians were frightfully scandalized at such proceedings; but no one could deny that a great moral improvement was soon perceptible in the parish, and the dissenters began to forsake their chapel to crowd around Mr. Faber's pulpit. His own austerities were fearful. He fasted rigorously, often eating for his dinner nothing more than a few potatoes and a herring, and in fact never taking a genuine meal except on Sunday. He wore a thick horsehair cord tied in knots about his waist. Want of food often brought upon him severe attacks of sickness, and sometimes he fainted in the church while reading prayers. In such matters as these he seems to have been his own director; but in other religious practices he governed himself a great deal by the advice of Dr. Newman. "I have a request to make," he writes to Newman in November, 1844, "which I cannot any longer refrain from making; but I shall submit at once to a No, if you will say it. I want you to revoke your prohibition, laid on me last October year, of invoking our Blessed Lady, the saints and angels. I do feel somehow weakened for the want of it, and fancy I should get strength if I did it."
It was some relief, perhaps, in this suffering of mind to give utterance to his Catholic yearnings with his pen, since he durst not pour out his whole soul in prayer. He had entered into a scheme for publishing a series of lives of the English saints, and written for it a Life of St. Wilfrid. All the volumes had caused more or less irritation; but in the Life of St. Wilfrid the Catholic tendencies of the tractarian school were developed with the utmost freedom—with so much freedom that we can hardly understand how they could have come from the pen of any man who was even nominally an Anglican. His difficulties, however, were now almost over. In the autumn of 1845, many of his friends were received into the church. Among them was Dr. Newman; and then Mr. Faber hesitated no longer. He put himself at once into communication with Dr. Wareing, the vicar apostolic of the eastern district, not to be instructed in Catholic doctrine, for that he knew and believed already; but to inquire about various minor points connected with a formal reception into the church. To abandon his work at Elton he knew would involve spiritual injury to many; and about that he felt at first some scruples. He asked advice of one whose counsel he had always followed in times of perplexity—we presume Dr. Newman. "Your own soul," he was told, "is the only consideration, and you must save that, because—"