I am by temperament a sceptic. But, at my feeblest, I am conscious of a power of choice, of a better and a worse. This ‘ought’ is my insignia of personality. Directly I admit that my life might be better than it is I have a sense of failure and feel a need of help from something or someone outside myself. This sense and this need are to me the meanings of the terms ‘sense of sin’ and ‘need of salvation’. I recognise absolute moral or, rather, spiritual values, quite beyond reason or argument; very often indeed contradicting reason and flouting even scientific law… I am not going to wait until I have fathomed all mysteries and secret lore before I begin to live. It has been my good fortune often to be in company with great souls, who have not only helped me in my intellectual quest for truth about religion, but have always encouraged me to strive towards experience, towards belief in religion. Fitfully and falteringly and with repeated failures I have tried to ‘mind that which is pure’ in me to guide me to God.

Francis H Knight, 1945