The aftermath of the sense of despair which had overtaken him as he witnessed Tom Harker’s last moments – a despair which seemed to become more metaphysical the more he thought about it – had been a period of fierce thinking in which, walking steadily through mile upon mile of Surrey woods and fields he faced the fact that he had lost faith in the power of reason. Reason could not halt the rush of victor and victim into the abyss, socialist planning could not regulate the human heartbeat, the lessons of love were too harsh to be learnt without the ferocious discipline of faith.

When he tried to explain some of this to Ada she thought him mad. She saw no sign in the world around her of the Apocalypse he seemed to anticipate, and as he was extremely vague as to the form he expected it to take, whether war or revolution, and if war whether between nations, classes, or sexes, and if revolution whether of the workers, the intellectuals, or even the beasts of the field, she thought it likely that he was deranged, and consulted their trusted friend and neighbour the philosopher H. W. Brigginshaw. He after some consideration came to the conclusion that Cornelius was suffering from mania, and after further consideration that the mania was religious. He therefore put it to him that the logical course of action was to enter a monastery.

It is not easy for a man approaching late middle age to be accepted as a novice monk. The abbots whom Cornelius visited, while convinced of his fervour, doubted his capacity to withstand the physical hardships of a novice’s life. It was only when Cornelius, about to write to the Abbot of a monastery which incorporated a boys’ public school, recognized the name as that of a former schoolfellow and so reminded him in his letter of the rigours of their early years and pointed out that no novitiate could be harsher than that one, that he found someone disposed to look sympathetically on his aspirations.