A sidelight is thrown on Mrs Kingsford’s attitude towards Roman Catholicism by the record of a conversation which her biographer cites her as having had on one occasion with a Roman Catholic priest. She was calling on a Catholic friend on the occasion, and speaking as usual in her very free and self-confident manner with regard to the religious views which she held. Some remark which she made elicited from the priest the rebuke, “Why, my daughter, you have been _thinking_. You should never do that. The Church saves us the trouble and danger of thinking, by telling us what to _believe_. We are only called on to believe. I never think: I dare not. I should go mad if I were to let myself think.” Anna Kingsford replied that what she wanted was to understand, and that it was impossible to do this without thinking. Believing without understanding was for her not faith but credulity. “How, except by thinking,” she asked, “does one learn whether the Church has the truth?” When the Hermetic Society was founded, W. T. Stead was editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and Mrs Kingsford wrote for him an account of the new Society. Stead, with his usual taste for dramatic headlines, entitled it “The Newest Thing in Religions.” This was the very last description that its founders were likely to tolerate. Anna Kingsford wrote back an indignant letter of repudiation. “So far,” she says, “from being the newest thing in religions, or even claiming to be a religion at all, that at which the Society aims is the recovery of what is really the oldest thing in religion, so old as to have become forgotten and lost—namely, its esoteric and spiritual, and therefore its true signification.” Elsewhere she writes of _The Perfect Way_ as not purporting to be a new gospel. “Its mission,” she says, “is that simply of rehabilitation and re-interpretation undertaken with the view, not of superseding Christianity, but of saving it.” She continues: