version of England could not be
left to the Jesuits the harm was done, so that when with greater
toleration the time was ripe to expand her organization it was necessary
to recruit her priests in Ireland. What the Jesuits had begun the Irish
completed. It had been amusing to listen to the lamentations of
Monseigneur Cripps; but Monseigneur Cripps had expressed, however
ludicrous his egoism, the failure of his Church in England.

Mark's statement of the Anglican position with nobody to answer his
arguments except the trees and the hedgerows seemed flawless. The level
road, the gentle breeze in the orchards on either side, the scent of the
grass, and the busy chirping of the birds coincided with the main point
of his argument that England was most inexpressibly Anglican and that
Roman Catholicism was most unmistakably not. His arguments were really
hasty foot-notes to his convictions; if each one had separately been
proved wrong, that would have had no influence on the point of view he
had reached. He forgot that this very landscape that was seeming
incomparable England herself had yesterday appeared complacent and
monotonous. In fact he was as bad as George Fox, who after taking off
his shoes to curse the bloody city of Lichfield should only have put
them on again to walk away from it.

The grey road was by now beginning to climb the foothills of the
Cotswolds; a yellow-hammer, keeping always a few paces ahead, twittered
from quickset boughs nine encouraging notes that drowned the echoes of
ancient controversies. In such a countryside no claims papal or
episcopal possessed the least importance; and Mark dismissed the subject
from his mind, abandoning himself to the pleasure of the slow ascent.
Looking back after a while he could see the town of Wield riding like a
ship in a sea of verdure, and when he surveyed thus England asleep in
the sunlight, the old ambition to become a preaching friar was kindled
again in his heart. He would re-establish the extinct and absolutely
English Order of St. Gilbert so that there should be no question of
Roman pretensions. Doubtless, St. Francis himself would understand a
revival of his Order without reference to existing Franciscans; but
nobody else would understand, and it would be foolish to insist upon
being a Franciscan if the rest of the Order disowned him and his
followers. If anybody had asked Mark at that moment why he wanted to
restore the preaching friars, he might have found