A remarkable and poignant thing is his utter blindness to the beauty spread round him in the fields of Sussex and Kent. He seems to have tramped the Kentish lanes, gone to and fro among the red villages of the Sussex weald, crossed the still, sweet valleys of the Rother and the Glotten Brook, without a thought for their loveliness. This exile in darkest Geneva was blind to all beauty save that which reached him in occasional, tortured flashes from the Thick Darkness where God was. The coloured, wooded country round Sissinghurst, the brooding, merging greens of the Rother Marshes, the farm-patched mound of the Isle of Oxney, the flushed hillock of ancient Rye had no voice for the messenger of Grace. Even the coming of Spring, to be to the earth what conversion is to the man, to do yearly for the Benenden meadows what Free Grace had done once for James Weller, brought no sympathetic thrill to the heart which saw only its own Particular mercies. As he groped and stumbled on his way, nature walked beside him through her mysteries, from the Spring Annunciation to the Falling Asleep of December. He might have had the comfort of her beauty, the fellowship of her experience, but he went aloof—the Protestant, the individualist, his eyes cast down up the narrow lane of his salvation where his footsteps were marked in blood. * * * * * To the Catholic Christian there is a special glamour about such stories as this of James Weller, of conversion and salvation outside the normal sphere of the Covenanted Mercies. They are like stories of men who win their way across uncharted seas in unseaworthy craft—of men who miss their way up a mountain, yet, somehow, arrive at the summit, bleeding and exhausted, by another path. So powerful is the Precious Blood that it can work its changes on mankind apart from the means appointed for its operation. Unlike the old life, the New Life is not bound by its own laws, and again and again it amazes us with miracles. “Behold, ye despisers, and wonder and perish....” The normal channel of the Precious Blood as it flows from the Sacred Heart of Christ, making us all partakers of his divine humanity, is the sacramental system of his Church, which is his Body. But just as there can be contacts between mind and mind without the agency of the body—though such contacts must always be abnormal, uncertain and unsatisfactory—so there is contact between the New Life and human lives which as yet stand outside the body of its functioning. And as these telepathic unions between mind and mind have a special glamour about them which perhaps we do not find in ordinary human intercourse, so these uncovenanted graces of the New Life give us a new thrill as of power unguessed and unrealised.