For all
the interest it excited, the secession of this extremely brilliant
person might have been the secession of a sacristan or a pew-opener. He
did not so much "go over to Rome" as sidle away from the Church of
England.
But this secession is well worth the attention of religious students. It
is an act of personality which helps one to understand the theological
chaos of the present-time, and a deed of temperament which illumines
some of the more obscure movements of religious psychology. Ronnie Knox,
as everybody calls him, the eyes lighting up at the first mention of his
name, has gone over to the Roman Catholic Church, not by any means with
a smile of cynicism on his face, but rather with the sweat of a struggle
still clinging to his soul.
He is the son of an Anglican bishop, a good man whose strong evangelical
convictions led him, among many other similar activities, to hold
missionary services on the sands of Blackpool. His mother died in his
infancy, and he was brought up largely with uncles and aunts, but his
own home, of which he speaks always with reverence and affection, was a
kind and vigorous establishment, a home well calculated to develop his
scholarly wit and his love of mischievous fun. Nothing in his
surroundings made for gloom or for a Calvinism of the soul. The
swiftness of his intellectual development might have made him sceptical
of theology in general, but no influence in his home was likely in any
way to make him sceptical of his father's theology in particular.
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