Confessions of a Convert

The following chapters were first published, in substance, in the American Catholic magazine, the "Ave Maria," in 1906-1907Cardinal Newman compares, somewhere, the sensations of a convert from Anglicanism to those of a man in a fairy story, who, after wandering all night in a city of enchantment, turns after sunrise to look back upon it, and finds to his astonishment that the buildings are no longer there; they have gone up like wraiths and mists under the light of the risen day. So the present writer has found. He no longer, as in the first months of his conversion, is capable of comparing the two systems of belief together, since that which he has left appears to him no longer a coherent item at all. There are, of course, associations, memories, and emotions still left in his mind -- some of them very sacred and dear to his heart; he still is happy in numbering among his friends many persons who still find amongst those associations and memories a system which they believe to be the religion instituted by Jesus Christ; yet he himself can no longer see in them anything more in hints and fragments and aspirations detached from their centre and reconstructed into a purely man edifice without foundation or solidity. Yet he is conscious of no bitterness at all -- at the worst experiences sometimes a touch of impatience merely at the thought of having been delayed so long by shadows from the possession of divine substance. He cannot, however, with justice, compare the two systems at all; one cannot, adequately, compare a dream with a reality. He has abandoned, therefore, the attempt -- which lack of leisure in any case would make practically useless -- to place side by side with his drowsy memories of Anglicanism the story of his vivid adventures under the sunlight of Eternal Truth. And he publishes the history of that long-drawn process whereby he passed from the one to the other, purely on the advice of numerous friends and inquirers. He is conscious of the appalling egotism of such pages as these; yet he has still to learn how an autobiography can be written without it.

Robert Hugh Benson (1871 1914) was an English Anglican priest who joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1903 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904. He was lauded in his own day as one of the leading figures in English literature and was the author of many novels and apologetic works.