For all the interest it excited, the secession of this extremely brilliant person might have been the secession of a sacristan or a pew-opener.

He did not so much "go over to Rome" as sidle away from the Church of England.
But this secession is well worth the attention of religious students.

It is an act of personality which helps one to understand the theological chaos of the present-time, and a deed of temperament which illumines some of the more obscure movements of religious psychology.

Ronnie Knox, as everybody calls him, the eyes lighting up at the first mention of his name, has gone over to the Roman Catholic Church, not by any means with a smile of cynicism on his face, but rather with the sweat of a struggle still clinging to his soul.
He is the son of an Anglican bishop, a good man whose strong evangelical convictions led him, among many other similar activities, to hold missionary services on the sands of Blackpool.

His mother died in his infancy, and he was brought up largely with uncles and aunts, but his own home, of which he speaks always with reverence and affection, was a kind and vigorous establishment, a home well calculated to develop his scholarly wit and his love of mischievous fun.