[Footnote 4: Concerning modernising tendencies, Father Ronald Knox says,
"I went to a meeting about it in Margaret Street, where crises in the
Church are invested with a peculiar atmosphere of delicious
trepidation."]

Somewhere, in speaking of the Church's attitude towards rich and poor,
he has confessed to carrying about with him "a permanently troubled
conscience." The phrase lives in his face. It is not the face of a man
who is at peace with himself. If he has peace of mind, it is a Peace of
Versailles.

One cannot look at that tall lean figure in its purple cassock, with the
stooping head, the somewhat choleric face, the low forehead deeply
scored with anxiety, the prominent light-coloured and glassy eyes
staring with perplexity under bushy brows, which are as carefully combed
as the hair of his head, the large obstinate nose with its challenging
tilt and wide war-breathing nostrils, the broad white moustache and
sudden pointed beard sloping inward; nor can one listen to the deep,
tired, and ghostly voice slowly uttering the laborious ideas of his
troubled mind with the somewhat painful pronunciation of the
elocutionist (he makes _chapell_ of Chapel); nor mark his languorous
movements and the slow swaying action of the attenuated body; one cannot
notice all this without feeling that in spite of his great courage and
his iron tenacity of purpose, he is a little weary of the battle, and
sometimes even perhaps conscious of a check for the cause which is far
dearer to him than his own life.

One thinks of him as a soul under a cloud. He gives one no feeling of
radiance, no sense of a living serenity. What serenity he possesses at
the centre of his being does not shine in his face nor sound in his