My starting point will be some words of Bishop Hensley Henson, written in his Journal during the early stages of the Malines Conversations.

‘In the afternoon I read Pusey’s Life. His essay at negotiating a union with the Roman Church appears to have run the normal course, and experienced the normal fortune. Eager approaches from the Anglican side; non-committal compliments on the Roman; restiveness and reproaches in both camps; extravagant Anglican expectations, and then sharp disillusionment when the Roman authorities finally speak. I cannot doubt that the present essay will repeat the too familiar-history.’

If we discount a certain bias and exaggeration in the writer’s expression of opinion, it can hardly be said that his forecast was not a true one. Bishop Bell’s summing up in his account of the Conversations in Archbishop Davidson’s Life, though sympathetic and optimistic, does not in essentials differ from Bishop Henson’s.

‘Of their effect on the Church as a whole’, he writes, ‘Who can speak? There has been progress in understanding, in charity, in desire. So far as the longed-for rapprochement was concerned, the fundamental difficulties remain unsolved. But channels of thought and methods of study have been started, from which perhaps in later days some great gain may result.’

And now, once again, twenty-two years after the publication of the Malines Report, The Times correspondence of last November, on ‘Catholicism Today’, has revealed on both sides of the dividing line a deeply-felt desire for rapprochement, and a widespread sense that the way to increasing unity of heart and mind lies in the growth of friendly contacts and in conferences, on the theological level, between representatives of the different parts of divided Christendom.