s took in every week The Church Times,
The Church Review, The English Churchman, Church Bells, The Record and
The Rock in order to play their part in the crisis. They attended
Protestant meetings to boo and hiss from the gallery or to applaud
violently gentlemen on their side who rose to ask the lecturer what they
supposed to be irrefutable questions. In the spring Michael made his
first Confession and was confirmed. The first Confession had more effect
on his imagination than the Confirmation, which in retrospect seemed
chiefly a sensation of disappointment that the Bishop in view of the
crisis in the Church refused to wear the mitre temptingly laid out for
him by Mr. Viner. The Confession, however, was a true test of Michael's
depth. Mr. Viner was by no means a priest who only thought of candles
and lace. He was a gaunt and humorous man, ready to drag out from his
penitents their very souls.

Michael found that first Confession an immense strain upon his
truthfulness and pluck, and he made up his mind never to commit another
mortal sin, so deeply did he blush in the agony of revelation. Venial
faults viewed in the aggregate became appalling, and the real sins, as
one by one Michael compelled himself to admit them, stabbed his
self-consciousness with daggers of shame. Michael had a sense of
completeness which prevented him from making a bad Confession, from
gliding over his sins and telling half-truths, and having embarked upon
the duties of his religion he was not going to avoid them. The
Confession seemed to last for ever. Beforehand, Michael had supposed
there would be only one commandment whose detailed sins would make his
heart beat with the difficulty of confessing them; but when he knelt in
the empty church before the severe priest, every breach of the other
commandments assumed a demoniac importance. Michael thought that never
before could Father Viner have listened to such a narration of human
depravity from a boy of fifteen, or even from a man full grown. He half
expected to see the priest rise in the middle and leave his chair in
disgust. Michael felt beads of sweat trickling from his forehead: the
strain grew more terrible: the crucifix before him gave him no help: the
book he held fell from his fingers. Then he heard the words of
absolution, tranquil as evening bells. The inessentials of his
passionate religion faded away in the strength and beauty of God's
acceptation of his penitence. Outside in the Apri