onable. We want to create an English tradition."

"What between the Roman party in the Anglican Church and the Anglican
party in the Roman Church," said Mark, "It seems a pity that some kind
of reunion cannot be effected."

"So it could," Monseigneur declared. "So it could, if it wasn't for the
Irish. Look at the way we treat our English converts. The clergy, I
mean. Why? Because the Irish do not want England to be converted."

Mark did not raise with Monseigneur Cripps the question of his doubts.
Indeed, before the plaice had been taken away he had decided that they
no longer existed. It became clear to him that the English Church was
England; and although he knew in his heart that Monseigneur Cripps was
suffering from a sense of grievance and that his criticism of Roman
policy was too obviously biased, it pleased him to believe that it was a
fair criticism.

Mark thanked Monseigneur Cripps for his hospitality and took a friendly
leave of him. An hour later he was walking back through the pleasant
vale of Wield toward the Cotswolds. As he went his way among the green
orchards, he thought over his late impulse to change allegiance,
marvelling at it now and considering it irrational, like one astonished
at his own behaviour in a dream. There came into his mind a story of
George Fox who drawing near to the city of Lichfield took off his shoes
in a meadow and cried three times in a loud voice "Woe unto the bloody
city of Lichfield," after which he put on his shoes again and proceeded
into the town. Mark looked back in amazement at his lunch with
Monseigneur Cripps and his own meditated apostasy. To his present mood
that intention to forsake his own Church appeared as remote from
actuality as the malediction of George Fox upon the city of Lichfield.

Here among these green orchards in the heart of England Roman
Catholicism presented itself to Mark's imagination as an exotic. The two
words "Roman Catholicism" uttered aloud in the quiet June sunlight gave
him the sensation of an allamanda or of a gardenia blossoming in an
apple-tree. People who talked about bringing the English Church into
line with the trend of Western Christianity lacked a sense of history.
Apart from the question whether the English Church before the
Reformation had accepted the pretensions of the Papacy, it was absurd
to suppose that contemporary Romanism had anything in common with
English Catholicism of the early sixteenth century. English Catholici