“The new ‘process’ began quite suddenly when I awoke in the shepherd’s hut one morning at Ripon.  The instant I awoke I knew it.  It was very early in the morning, just before sunrise, but there was a little wood behind me, and the birds were beginning to chirp.

“It’s very hard to describe it in words, but the first thing to say is that I was not exactly happy just then, but absolutely content.  I think I should say that it was like this:  I saw suddenly that what had been wrong in me was that I had made myself the center of things, and God a kind of circumference.  When He did or allowed things, I said, ’Why does He?’—­from my point of view.  That is to say, I set up my ideas of justice and love and so forth, and then compared His with mine, not mine with His.  And I suddenly saw—­or, rather, I knew already when I awoke—­that this was simply stupid.  Even now I cannot imagine why I didn’t see it before:  I had heard people say it, of course—­in sermons and books—­but I suppose it had meant nothing to me. (Father Hildebrand tells me that I had seen it intellectually, but had never embraced it with my will.) Because when one once really sees that, there’s no longer any puzzle about anything.  One can simply never say ‘Why?’ again.  The thing’s finished.

“Now this ‘process’ (as Father H. calls it) has gone on in a most extraordinary manner ever since.  That beginning near Ripon was like opening a door into another country, and I’ve been walking ever since and seeing new things.  All sorts of things that I had believed as a Catholic—­things, I mean, which I assented to simply because the Church said so, have, so to speak, come up and turned themselves inside out.  I couldn’t write them down, because you can’t write these things down, or even put them intelligibly to yourself.  You just see that they are so.  For instance, one morning at mass—­quite suddenly—­I saw how the substance of the bread was changed, and how our Lord is united with the soul at Communion—­of course it’s a mystery (that’s what I mean by saying that it can’t be written down)—­but I saw it, in a flash, and I can see it still in a sort of way.  Then another day when the Major was talking about something or other (I think it was about the club he used to belong to in Piccadilly), I understood about our Lady and how she is just everything from one point of view.  And so on.  I had that kind of thing at Doctor Whitty’s a good deal, particularly when I was getting better.  I could talk to him all the time, too, or count the knobs on the wardrobe, or listen to the Major and Gertie in the garden—­and yet go on all the time seeing things.  I knew it wasn’t any good talking to Doctor Whitty himself much, though I can’t imagine why a man like that doesn’t see it all for himself....

“It seems to me most extraordinary now that I ever could have had those other thoughts I told Father H. about—­I mean about sins, and about wondering whether, after all, the Church was actually true.  In a sort of way, of course, they come back to me still, and I know perfectly well I must be on my guard; but somehow it’s different.