What I feel about a man like Father Rowley is that he probably had a tremendous fight to be good.  Of course, I may be perfectly wrong and he may have had no fight at all.  I know one of the people at the Mission House told me that, though there is nobody who likes smoking better than he or more enjoys a pint of beer with his dinner, he has given up both at St. Agnes merely to set an example to weak people.  I feel that his goodness was with such energy fought for that it now exists as a kind of complete thing and will go on existing when Father Rowley himself is dead.  I begin to understand the doctrine of the treasury of merit.  I remember you once told me how grateful I ought to be to God because I had apparently escaped the temptations that attack most boys.  I am grateful; but at the same time I can’t claim any merit for it!  The only time in my life when I might have acquired any merit was when I was at Haverton House.  Instead of doing that, I just dried up, and if I hadn’t had that wonderful experience at Whitsuntide in Meade Cantorum church nearly three years ago I should be spiritually dead by now.

This is a very long letter, and I don’t seem to have left myself any time to tell you about St. Agnes’ Church.  It reminds me of my father’s mission church in Lima Street, and oddly enough a new church is being built almost next door just as one was being built in Lima Street.  I went to the children’s Mass last Sunday, and I seemed to see him walking up and down the aisle in his alb, and I thought to myself that I had never once asked you to say Mass for his soul.  Will you do so now next time you say a black Mass?  This is a wretched letter, and it doesn’t succeed in the least in expressing what I owe to you and what I already owe to Father Rowley.  I used to think that the Sacred Heart was a rather material device for attracting the multitude, but I’m beginning to realize in the atmosphere of St. Agnes’ that it is a gloriously simple devotion and that it is human nature’s attempt to express the inexpressible.  I’ll write to you again next week.  Please give my love to everybody at the Rectory.

     Always your most affectionate

     Mark.

Father Rowley had been at St. Agnes’ seven or eight years when Mark found himself attached to the Mission, in which time he had transformed the district completely.  It was a small parish (actually of course it was not a parish at all, although it was fast qualifying to become one) of something over a thousand small houses, few of which were less than a century old.  The streets were narrow and crooked, mostly named after bygone admirals or forgotten sea-fights; the romantic and picturesque quarter of a great naval port to the casual glance of a passer-by, but heartbreaking to any except the most courageous resident on account of its overcrowded and tumbledown condition.  Yet it lacked the dreariness of an East End slum, for the sea winds blew down the narrowest streets and alleys, sailors and soldiers were always in view, and the windows of the pawnbrokers were filled with the relics of long voyages, with idols and large shells, with savage weapons and the handiwork of remote islands.