He said he would gladly give me all Russia's spirituality if I could give him a tenth of England's moral earnestness.

And he told me this story: A man set out one winter's night to murder an old woman in her cottage.

As he tramped through the snow with the hatchet under his blouse, it suddenly occurred to him that it was a Saint's Day.
Instantly he dropped on his knees in the snow, crossed himself violently with trembling hands, and in a guilty voice implored God to forgive him for his evil intention.

Then he rose up, refreshed and forgiven, postponing the murder till the next night.
Undoubtedly, I fear, the devotion of priest-ridden countries, which evokes so spectacular an effect on the stranger of unbalanced judgment, is largely a matter of superstition; how many prayers are inspired by a lottery, how many candles lighted by fear of a ghost?
But Father Knox, whose aesthetic nature had early responded with a vital impulse to Gothic architecture and the pomp and mystery of priestly ceremonial, felt in Bruges that the spirit of the Chapel of the Sacred Blood must be introduced into the Church of England "to save our country from lapsing into heathenism." What, I wonder, is his definition of that term, heathenism?
Bruges had a decisive effect, not only on his aesthetic impulses, but on his moral sense.

His conduct as an Anglican priest was frankly that of a Roman propagandist.