I said in an earlier chapter that I had an inborn fondness for Catholic ceremonial, and this, I suppose, was part of my general love of material beauty. Amid such surroundings as I have described, it was a fondness not easily indulged. When I was twelve years old, I was staying at Leamington in August, and on a Holy Day I peeped into the Roman Church there, and saw for the first time the ceremonies of High Mass; and from that day on I longed to see them reproduced in the Church of England. During one of our periodical visits to London, I discovered the beautiful church in Gordon Square where the "Adherents of a Restored Apostolate" celebrate Divine Worship with bewildering splendour. The propinquity of our house to Westminster Abbey enabled me to enter into the more chastened, yet dignified, beauty of the English rite. At Harrow the brightness and colour of our School-Chapel struck my untutored eye as "exceeding magnifical"; and the early celebrations in the Parish Church had a solemnity which the Chapel lacked. But the happiest memory of all is connected with a little Church[65] about two miles from my home. It is a tiny structure of one aisle, with the altar fenced off by a screen of carved oak. It served a group of half a dozen houses, and it stood amid green fields, remote from traffic, and scarcely visible except to those who searched for it. There an enthusiastic and devoted priest spent five and twenty years of an isolated ministry; and there, for the first time in our communion, I saw the Divine Mysteries celebrated with the appropriate accessories. My walks to that secluded altar, in the fresh brightness of summer mornings, can never be forgotten until the whole tablet is blotted. On the sky-line, the great masses of distant woodland, half-veiled in mist, lay like a blue cloud. Within, there was "the fair white linen cloth upon the wooden table, with fresh flowers above, and the worn slabs beneath that record the dim names of the forgotten dead"; and there "amid the faint streaks of the early dawn, the faithful, kneeling round the oaken railing, took into their hands the worn silver of the Grail-- "The chalice of the Grapes of God."[66] Perhaps it was just as well for a boy that these glimpses of beautiful worship were few and far between. One was saved from the perils of a mere externalism, and was driven inward on the unseen realities which ceremonial may sometimes obscure. And then, when one got up to Oxford, one found all the splendours of the sanctuary in rich abundance, and enjoyed them with a whole-hearted self-abandonment. I need not repeat what I have already said about St. Barnabas and Cowley and the other strongholds of Catholic worship. I am eternally their debtor, and the friends with whom I shared them have helped to shape my life.