These were men of mercy whose godly deeds have not failed. Ecclus. 44, 10.

There are still a great many people in England today who regard Catholics as strange and even sinister folk who worship with strange rites in a foreign tongue, render allegiance to the Pope of Rome and have a notable reverence for the Mother of Christ. Yet four hundred years ago there was scarcely a man, woman or child in England who did not accept these rites and this allegiance and this reverence as part of their daily lives, as had their forefathers for many centuries before them. Gathered around this temporary altar, to be present once again at the eternal sacrifice of Calvary within these ruins of a once magnificent abbey, our minds and imaginations inevitably take us back to those days of Catholic England when the great abbey church of St Mary at Hayles resounded by day and night to the prayers of the Cistercian monks who had dedicated their lives here to the service of God and of their fellow-men.

Nearly nine hundred years ago Hayles Manor came into the possession of one William Leuric of whom it is recorded that he freed twelve serfs here. In 1246 Richard, Earl of Cornwall, founded the Abbey of St Mary at Hayles in fulfilment of a vow made on escaping from shipwreck. A few years later his son presented to the abbey church the venerated relic known as ‘the Holy Blood of Hayles’, contained in a crystal phial and believed to contain some of the blood shed by our Redeemer on Calvary, which, until it was ruthlessly destroyed by Cromwell’s agents at the destruction of the monastery, was the venerated object of pilgrimage for countless devout men and women both from this country and from over the seas.

Obviously enough a short article on the history of Catholic thought in England in the last hundred years can only suggest a few thoughts of a general nature, for a mere date list without detailed historical interpretation would be useless, and several volumes would be needed for the latter task. A hundred years ago Catholic thought in England was broadening under the influence of Wiseman and Newman. It is, however, a mistake to think that they created it, for behind them lies the solid historical and spiritual interests of the priests of the penal days: strong controversialists, such as Milner, historians of the type of Lingard, and writers like Butler and Challoner, were all massively English in their virtues and prejudices. Their thought was unspeculative, concrete, and strongly, though not deeply, based on the Latin Fathers.

With Wiseman and Newman, new influences were brought to bear which served to constitute the pattern of Catholic thought for the next fifty years. Wiseman with his generous, though somewhat undisciplined, imagination brought Catholic England into contact with the thought of the Munich circle and of the French Liberal school. For Wiseman these movements involved a vision of the restoration of the faith, but a glance at Ward’s Life makes it clear that his hopes rested on an inadequate intellectual synthesis, in that it was too strongly influenced by theological Traditionalism and implied a naive view of Liberalism. It was, in short, a Catholic variety of the early nineteenth century theologies of feeling. This statement serves to stress the interesting, though often forgotten, fact that the thinkers of the Catholic Restoration knew little of the intellectual heritage of the Middle Ages, and what they did see they tended to misunderstand as they saw it reflected in the blurred mirror of Romanticism.

Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which paved the way for the re-establishment of the Hierarchy twenty-one years later, brought no relief to the Religious Orders of men. Indeed it considerably increased the disabilities to which they had been so long subjected. Referring to Jesuits and members of other Orders, the Act states that ‘it is expedient to make provision for the gradual suppression and final prohibition of the same’. It goes on to enact that every member of such an order actually in England must register with the local clerk of the peace within six months, under penalty of £50 for each month of unregistered residence. Any member landing in England thereafter is to be deemed guilty of a misdemeanour and banished for life. It is made an offence, punishable by fme and imprisonment, to receive the vows of Religious in England or Ireland, and the person making vows is liable to banishment for life. An attempt to repeal these clauses was made in 1846, but without success. It is difficult to realise that when the Oxford Movement was in full flood the great Religious Orders were outlawed and doomed to extinction.

Time was to show that these vicious laws were still-born and would never be invoked. It is easy to be wise after the event. The years between 1829 and 1850 that achieved so much for the Church were, for the Religious, a time of grave anxiety and uncertainty. Their strength lay in their schools. It was only here that they could attempt any degree of community life, and it was from their schools that they hoped to draw recruits. The French Revolution had driven to England the schools that had for so long rendered distinguished service beyond the seas. Long before Emancipation the Benedictines were firmly established at Ample-forth and Downside.

Among the historians of Christian culture alive today, two stand out with particular distinction: M. Etienne Gilson and Mr Christopher Dawson. They are both prolific writers, and neither is always equal to his own standard; but their best work is of a very high quality indeed. These qualities differ, however, and it is interesting to compare diem. Both men are scholars through and through, and both possess to a very unusual degree the real historian’s gift of generalising from particular data. But their points of view differ, and their data. M. Gilson is a connoisseur of ideas; of other men’s ideas, in studying which he discovers his own. He knows much about many human minds, precisely in so far as these minds have become articulate in conceptual thought, and expresses this thought in words and writing. An expert in philosophies, he is scrupulously careful to respect his documentary data; but he wrings all he can out of it. For he makes it his business to discern and define what is individual and original in each thinker he studies; to study therefore each case in and for itself before passing on to another one. Then, having so treated a number of cases, he pauses to consider interconnections; and so draws up patterns of intellectual transmission and differentiation. All his work is a study of minds in their expressed ideas; with a view, first, to discovering originality and then to tracing derivations.

Mr Dawson’s very different work is harder to characterise. His range is of course wider, materially, but it is less abstract. He is called a philosopher of history, but he is hardly a historian of philosophy. Though his work teems with individual testimonies he never, or scarcely ever, pauses long to consider an individual.

‘Laetati sumus pro diebus, quibus nos humiliasti, annis quibus vidimas mala.’ (Ps. 89.)

There are as many roads to Rome as there are travellers. Each one’s experience is different, so that the record of each journey has a unique value. I was a girl of eighteen when the Church first attracted me, and a woman of fifty-four when I was finally received. What follows is the story of a long, bitter and unavailing struggle against the endless patience of God.

I was the only child of an Oxford don who died young, and was brought up in the traditional beauty of an ancient university town. My mother was a devout High Anglican, but very tolerant: religion was never forced on me, and as a child I took little or no interest in it. At seventeen I read a little Plato at school, and thus discovered a new world of spiritual values. In this way, helped by my mother’s influence, and probably impelled also by some hidden process of inward conversion, I was drawn towards the religion which had hitherto been to me mere words and conventional churchgoing. I began to go to church of my own will, and to read the gospels, The Imitation of Christ, a book of selections from the German mystics, Dante, and St Augustine’s Confessions. There also developed a profound interest in the contemplative life, which persisted, sometimes consciously, but more often in secret, through all the years of my infidelity, working like a recurrent fever in the system. At this time I seriously thought of becoming a Catholic, and was encouraged by my mother, who, like so many Anglicans, had a great admiration for Rome, combined with an intensely patriotic attachment to her national church. I had also a secret desire, which I kept to myself, of eventually joining one of the Contemplative Orders.