applies to Our Lord. I always feel it wouldn't
matter a bit to me if the four Gospels were proved to be forgeries
to-morrow, because I should still be convinced that Our Lord was
God. I know this is a platitude, but I don't think until I met
Father Rowley that I ever realized the force and power that goes
with exceptional goodness. There are so many people who are good
because they were born good. Richard Ford, for example, he couldn't
have ever been anything else but good, but I always feel that
people like him remain practically out of reach of the ordinary
person and that the goodness is all their own and dies with them
just as it was born with them. What I feel about a man like Father
Rowley is that he probably had a tremendous fight to be good. Of
course, I may be perfectly wrong and he may have had no fight at
all. I know one of the people at the Mission House told me that,
though there is nobody who likes smoking better than he or more
enjoys a pint of beer with his dinner, he has given up both at St.
Agnes merely to set an example to weak people. I feel that his
goodness was with such energy fought for that it now exists as a
kind of complete thing and will go on existing when Father Rowley
himself is dead. I begin to understand the doctrine of the treasury
of merit. I remember you once told me how grateful I ought to be to
God because I had apparently escaped the temptations that attack
most boys. I am grateful; but at the same time I can't claim any
merit for it! The only time in my life when I might have acquired
any merit was when I was at Haverton House. Instead of doing that,
I just dried up, and if I hadn't had that wonderful experience at
Whitsuntide in Meade Cantorum church nearly three years ago I
should be spiritually dead by now.

This is a very long letter, and I don't seem to have left myself
any time to tell you about St. Agnes' Church. It reminds me of my
father's mission church in Lima Street, and oddly enough a new
church is being built almost next door just as one was being built
in Lima Street. I went to the children's Mass last Sunday, and I
seemed to see him walking up and down the aisle in his alb, and I
thought to myself that I had never once asked you to say Mass for
his soul. Will you do so now next time you say a b