His conversion story is included in a compilation called Conversions to the Catholic Church (1933) and I reproduce it here:
I have been asked to give an account of my conversion, and I find great difficulty in putting into other words what I have already recorded in my Autobiography. Accordingly I quote from my own book as follows:
'A year after I sold The Academy I became a Catholic (in 1911). During the time I was editing The Academy I was a High Church Anglican, and I ran the paper from that point of view, as far as religion was concerned.
From the time I went up to Oxford right up to the time when I became editor of The Academy, a period of about eighteen years, I really had no religion. I was what most Englishmen actually are, whether they admit it or not, a pagan. (I am not exaggerating. I saw the other day a table of statistics which gave the number of people in England - outside the Church of Rome - who went to church on Easter Sunday last year as seven per cent of the whole nation.)
Soon after I started editing The Academy I began to get contributions from Mr. Arthur Machen. It was these contributions of his which sent me back to Christianity...
What changed me from High Anglicanism to Catholicism was simply that reading of history, and finding out all the lies that had been taught to me as truth at School and at Oxford, convinced me that that High Anglican position, however attractive it may be, does not hold water.
The theory that the Church of England is a "branch of the Catholic Church," and that the continuity was never broken at the Reformation, seems to me to be demonstrably false. I held it for a long time, and abandoned it reluctantly, only because the evidence was too strong for me. What finally converted me to Catholicism, though I did not actually become a Catholic till more than a year after I read it, was Pope Pius X's Encyclical Against Modernism.
This stately and magnificent piece of argument was, I suppose, sent round to the papers for notice. At any rate, a copy of it was sent to The Academy. The original is, of course, written in Latin, but the copy I got was an English translation. I thought of sending it for review, but picking it up and reading a few lines I became interested, and took it home to read it myself. It had the effect of convincing me that the Catholic Church in communion with the See of Rome, is the only true Church. I definitely made up my mind to become a Catholic, but I put it off chiefly because, as appears from what I have just written, my conversion had come entirely from the intellect. I felt no emotion about it. On the contrary, I felt in some ways that to become a Catholic would be a tiresome necessity. I would have avoided it if I could. "At any rate," I thought, "there is no particular hurry."
The emotional side of Catholicism did not reach me till some time after I had been in the Church. When I first joined it, I was cold about it. The ritual, although I always liked it and thought it beautiful, did not influence me in the very slightest degree, nor has it ever done to this day. When I had been a Catholic for about eighteen months I underwent the most violent persecution, which lasted on and off, for at least ten years. The result of this persecution was to force me deeper and deeper into my religion. For years that religion was my only support and consolation in a succession of almost unbearable miseries.
Instead of being cold I became very devout and mystical. I lived on reading The Lives of the Saints, and such mystics as St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross. I got to the stage of glorying in the persecution I was undergoing, and regarding it as a special sign of grace, which, of course, it undoubtedly was. I even had supernatural experiences, but I cannot speak of them in this book, except in one instance which I will refer to later on, although I am not definitely sure that it was really supernatural.
It is with deep regret that I say that I am now less devoutly religious than I was during those years. I have never, as far as I know, fallen out of a state of grace, and I am just as determined to live and die a Catholic as I ever was. But the wonderful feelings I used to have are gone. So have the supernatural experiences; and though a priest in confession told me that this was simply because I no longer needed them, and that it was greater merit for me to go on simply being a good Catholic without them, I believed in my heart that that is not really what has happened. The fact is that, at the time I am speaking of, I intended to become a saint, which was a perfectly laudable ambition, at any rate, however hopeless it may have been. Now I do not want to be a saint, I am afraid. When one considers this, it is enough to make one shed tears of blood, but it is the plain truth. Perhaps I shall change again. Meanwhile, I have become, I fear, much more worldly than I was during those terrible years when I was, apparently, "hated of all men," and persecuted and even cast into prison more than once'....
Thus concludes the quotation from my Autobiography which was written in 1928 and published in 1929. Looking back at it now I see a gap in the narrative between the time I read the Pope's Encyclical, which was I believe in 1910 or the end of 1909, and the actual date of my reception by Monsignor Bickerstaffe Drew in the private chapel in his house on Salisbury Plain in May 1911. More than a year elapsed between these two events, and when I was writing my Autobiography I had evidently forgotten all about that year. My impression at the time I was writing the Autobiography was that my misfortunes did not begin till eighteen months after I became a Catholic, but I realise now that, from a worldly point of view, the trouble began when I lost my paper, The Academy, in June 1910. As long as I was in the powerful position which the editorship of a weekly paper bestows on a man, my enemies, of whom I had a great many, were afraid of me. But when I was deprived of this weapon of defence they immediately began to start operations. (They are all dead now!)
Although from a worldly point of view the years 1910 amd 1911 were the most successful of my life, I was during that time drawing nearer every day to a cataclysm which broke up my home, devastated my life and turned me for many years into a harried, tormented and hunted man.
The trouble was brewing all through those two years and the storm burst upon me in 1912. I weathered it solely because I was a Catholic, for if I had not been one I would inevitably have decided that life was not worth living, and would have taken the quickest way out of it.
I refer to all this now simply because it brings out the supernatural element in my conversion. Of course, all conversions have their supernatural side but it is not often so obvious as it was in my case. Here was I strangely and suddenly converted, without emotion, without enthusiasm and almost reluctantly to Catholicism, and shortly afterwards hurled into a fiery furnace of affliction which lasted on and off for ten years. Thenceforward all my help and my consolation came from my religion, for I got no help and no sympathy from fellow Catholics. Quite the contrary! Would any less cruel experience have turned me into a real Catholic? I guess not. Q.E.D.
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