Page:The Catholic Church and Conversion - G. K. Chesterton.pdf/9

 EDITOR'S NOTE

It is with diffidence that anyone born into the Faith can approach the tremendous subject of Conversion. Indeed, it is easier for one still quite unacquainted with the Faith to approach that subject than it is for one who has had the advantage of the Faith from childhood. There is at once a sort of impertinence in approaching an experience other than one's own (necessarily more imperfectly grasped), and an ignorance of the matter. Those born into the Faith very often go through an experience of their own parallel to, and in some way resembling that experience whereby original strangers to the Faith come to see it and accept it. Those born into the Faith often, I say, go through an experience of scepticism in youth, as the years proceed, and it is still a common phenomenon (though not so often to be observed as it was a lifetime ago) for men of the Catholic culture, acquainted with the Church from childhood, to leave in it early manhood and never to return. But it is nowadays a still more frequent phenomenon—and it is to this that I allude—for those to whom scepticism so strongly appealed in youth to discover, by an experience of men and of reality in all its varied forms that the transcendental truths they had been taught in child- 5