It is always difficult to see a situation from a point of view which has never been ours, and it is sometimes more difficult to recapture, in imagination and sympathy, a point of view which is ours no longer. The more ardent our conviction the more difficult is the task of approaching a situation with the eyes and hearts of those who differ from us. Yet normally the accomplishment of this task is a necessary preliminary to all fruitful controversy. If you attack a man’s strong convictions and, in attacking them, betray your blindness to their influence over his heart and mind, or to the real truth implicit in them, you will produce nothing but irritation and a stronger loyalty to the error you are trying to dislodge. To be able to understand and to show that you understand what his convictions mean to him; to be able to separate in your own mind the true from the false in the things that claim his allegiance, is the only sure way of securing from him a fair hearing for the truth which he lacks and you possess.

In our relations with Anglo-Catholics we are generally conspicuously remiss in acting upon these first principles of fruitful controversy, and our failure arises in part from a quite natural inability to understand a point of view very different from our own. The result is an inevitable feeling, generally inarticulate, that an Anglo-Catholic must be either a knave or a fool. Even when unconsciously present in the mind this presupposition does not make for success in controversy, when we are faced by opponents whose learning and honesty are probably not less than our own.