Agnostic Years
Lunn was the son of a Methodist lay preacher, but in his book Now I See (1933) he writes that the religious instruction he received at school was so "woolly" that "I was never a Methodist, nor, for that matter, an Anglican, in any proper sense of the term." As a result, when he read Leslie Stephen's An Agnostic's Apology, "I found myself defenceless — thanks to the miserable deficiency of Anglican education — against his onslaughts." Lunn became an agnostic.
In 1924 he published Roman Converts, which consisted of highly critical studies of five eminent converts to Roman Catholicism: Newman, Manning, Tyrell, Chesterton and Knox. Rather to Lunn's surprise, the book drew good-humoured responses from Knox and Chesterton, the only two of his "Roman converts" still living. This, plus a number of questions left unanswered by his three years of research for Roman Converts, left him with a sense of unfinished business in relation to the Roman Catholic Church.
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