"
A visit to Belgium hastened the inevitable decision of such a
temperament:
. . . the extraordinary devotion of the people wherever we went,
particularly at Bruges, struck home with a sense of immeasurable
contrast to the churches of one's own country. . . .
He did not apparently feel the moral contrast between Belgian and
English character.
. . . The tourist, I know, thinks of it as _Bruges la Morte_, but
then the tourist does not get up for early Masses; he would find
life then . . . he can at least go on Friday morning to the chapel of
the Saint Sang and witness the continuous stream of people that
flows by, hour after hour, to salute the relic and to make their
devotions in its presence; he would find it hard to keep himself
from saying, like Browning at High Mass, "This is too good not to
be true."
Might he not perhaps say with another great man, "What must God be if He
is pleased by things which simply displease His educated creatures?" In
a country where the churches were once far more crowded than in Belgium,
I was told by a discerning man, Prince Alexis Obolensky, a former
Procurator of the Holy Synod, that all such devotion is simply
superstition. He said he would gladly give me all Russia's spirituality
if I could give him a tenth of England's moral earnestness. And he told
me this story:
A man set out one winter's night to murder an old woman in her
cottage.
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