ontinued attachment to it of Frances. But what he said to Maurice
Baring about a Porch is representative. Like Father Maturin he felt
he owed so much to his Anglican friends: he hated to stress overmuch
the revulsion from Anglicanism in the process of conversion. But it
did at this date contribute to the converging arguments.

He wrote to Maurice Baring:

So many thanks for the sermons, which I will certainly return as
you suggest. I had the other day a trying experience, and I think a
hard case of casuistry; I am not sure that I was right; but also not
by any means sure I was wrong. Long ago, before my present crisis, I
had promised somebody to take part in what I took to be a small
debate on labour. Too late, by my own carelessness, I found to my
horror it had swelled into a huge Anglo-Catholic Congress at the
Albert Hall. I tried to get out of it, but I was held to my promise.
Then I reflected that I could only write (as I was already writing)
to my Anglo-Catholic friends on the basis that I was one of them now
in doubt about continuing such; and that their conference in some
sense served the same purpose as their letters. What affected me
most, however, was that by my own fault I had put them into a hole.
Otherwise, I would not just now speak from or for their platform,
just as I could not (as yet at any rate) speak from or for yours. So
I spoke very briefly, saying something of what I think about social
ethics. Whether or not my decision was right, my experience was
curious and suggestive, though tragic; for I felt it like a farewell.
There was no doubt about the enthusiasm of those thousands of
Anglo-Catholics. But there was also no doubt, unless I am much
mistaken, that many of them besides myself would be Roman Catholics
rather than accept things they are quite likely to be asked to
accept--for instance, by the Lambeth Conference. For though my own
distress, as in most cases I suppose, has much deeper grounds than
clerical decisions, yet if I cannot stay where I am, it will be a
sort of useful symbol that the English Church has done something
decisively Protestant or Pagan. I mean that to those to whom I cannot
give my spiritual biography, I can say that the insecurity I felt in
Anglicanism was typified in the Lambeth Conference. I am at least
sure that much turns on that Conference, if not for me, for large
numbers of