Commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms, Vol. 1

Excerpt from Commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms, Vol. 1
In Maarten Maarten's novel, The Healers, a Dutch lady, who is just about to become a Catholic, is assailed, as with a final broadside, with the objection that she will be turning round and giving the lie to the whole history of her country. An enormous, oppressive consideration which perhaps reduces to terms some part at least of the vague bewilderment, the shivering diver's malaise who funks the plunge, which is the common and the inevitable experience of converts: inevitable, because, let reasoning lead never so straight and personal comforters be never so reassuring, that particular act of faith can never not be an act. The shock of this alteration of spiritual and intellectual climate is greater, perhaps, for a Briton or a Dutchman than for any others, just because that Revolution in the sixteenth century did so far succeed in making, for a time, the new religion overlay the whole length and breadth of public life in the nation.
A Nonconformist, it has been said (perhaps unjustly), could not write the history of England from his Nonconformist point of view, because he is foreign to it, all but a phase which came late and obtained only partially. From his point of view he cannot command the subject.