"I could go on for hours telling you these very simple and obvious things which must be so familiar to you. To me the amazement of this Movement is that it has taken so long to come. We have groaned under the oppression of what we have now thrown off, so long and so hopelessly; the Revision that the High Churchmen made such a bother about a few years ago came to so little; that now, to see this thing spreading like a great spring-tide over the face of England is marvellous indeed! And when one knows what it means--no mere liturgical change, no mere lopping off here and changing there, but a transformation of the root ideas of Christianity; a transference of its whole proof and evidence from the outward to the inward field, and therewith the uprush of a certainty and joy unknown to our modern life; one can but bow one's head, as those that hear mysterious voices on the wind. "For so into the temple of man's spirit, age by age, comes the renewing Master of man's life--and makes His tabernacle with man. 'Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, And the King of Glory shall come in.'" Meynell bowed his head upon his hands. The pulse of hope and passion in the letter was almost overpowering. It came, he knew, from an elderly man, broken by many troubles, and tormented by arthritis, yet a true saint, and at times a great preacher. The next letter he opened came from a priest in the diocese of Aix.... "The effect of the various encyclicals and of the ill-advised attempt to make both clergy and laity sign the Modernist decrees has had a prodigious effect all over France--precisely in the opposite sense to that desired by Pius X. The spread of the Movement is really amazing. Fifteen years ago I remember hearing a French critic say--Edmond Scherer, I think, the successor of Sainte Beuve--'The Catholics have not a single intellectual of any eminence--and it is a misfortune for _us_, the liberals. We have nothing to fight--we seem to be beating the air.'