Robert Hugh Benson
Robert Hugh Benson was the son of Archbishop Benson of Canterbury, the ecclesiastical head of the Church of England. He was born in 1871, and was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, England. He served in the Anglican Ministry for nine years, and entered the Catholic Church in 1903. “Cardinal Newman compares, somewhere, the sensations of a convert from Anglicanism to those of a man in a fairy story, who, after wandering all night in a city of enchantment, turns after sunrise to look back upon it, and finds to his astonishment that the buildings are no longer there; they have gone up like wraiths and mists under the light of the risen day. So the present writer has found. He no longer, as in the first months of his conversion, is capable of comparing the two systems of belief together, since that which he has left appears to him no longer a coherent system at all. There are, of course, associations, memories, and emotions still left in his mind–some of them very sacred and dear to his heart; he still is happy in numbering among his friends many persons who still find amongst those associations and memories a system which they believe to be the religion instituted by Jesus Christ; yet he himself can no longer see in them anything more than hints and fragments and aspirations detached from their center and reconstructed into a purely human edifice without foundation or solidity. Yet he is conscious of no bitterness at all–at the worst he experiences sometimes a touch of impatience merely at the thought of having been delayed so long by shadows from the possession of divine substance. He cannot, however, with justice, compare a dream with a reality. He has abandoned, therefore, the attempt–which lack of leisure in any case would make practically useless–to place side by side with his drowsy memories of Anglicanism the story of his vivid adventures under the sunlight of Eternal Truth.”