"Father Dawbeny is undoubtedly one of the finest character studies among all the memorable people created by Ernest Raymond in some thirty years of writing; fine in two senses, for not only is the delineatin and the building up of this Anglo-Catholic priest a remarkable achievement but the man himself is so truly great, so godly and yet so firmly rooted to the ground, so full of love for his fellow men, so conscious of his own weaknesses, so full of strength when justice hangs in the balance. Father Dawbeny came to the ministry with one great urge filling his unhappy heart - to save his own soul from embittered hate by turning the fierce emothions engendered by his lover's unfaithfulness into an all-consuming dedication to the service of humanity. He left behind him his noble home under the mountains of Cumberland and his distinguished career in the Army and devoted his life and his possessions to the rehabilitation of the little church in the near-slum area which abuts o the large mansions of Kensington. Here, amid the squalor of the irreligious poor, he introduced the beauty of High Church ceremony as an antidote to the ugliness surrounding his parishioners, combines with simple, unpretentious guidance through all the storms which came to their harrowed lives. His life was not an easy one, he found himself assaulted from within and without, but his innate goodness prevailed alike against th emalice of vicious parishioners, the indignation and jealousy of a neighbouring ecclesiastic, the denunciation and unscrupulous attack of the local Communists, the physcial violence of the bombs in the war years, and finally the attempt of distant diocesan authorities to demolish his church and, with it, most of his life's work.
But his triumph in the end is as complete as it is strange and unexpected."