Robert Hugh Benson

The Necromancers Robert Hugh Benson

Robert Hugh Benson (1871 - 1914) was the youngest son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. After college Benson was ordained as a priest in the Church of England. While on a trip to the Middle East Benson began doubting the Church of England and eventually joined the Community of the Resurrection. In 1903 he became a Roman Catholic. In 1904 he was ordained as a priest. The Necromancers depicts the evils of spiritualism. An excerpt reads, "And so the struggle had gone on; Laurie had protested, stormed, sulked, taken refuge in rhetoric and dignity alternately; and his mother had with gentle persistence objected, held her peace, argued, and resisted, conflicting step by step against the inevitable, seeking to reconcile her son by pathos and her God by petition; and then in an instant, only four days ago, it seemed that the latter had prevailed; and today Laurie, in a black suit, rent by sorrow, at this very hour at which the two ladies sat and talked in the drawing-room, was standing by an open grave in the village churchyard, seeing the last of his love, under a pile of blossoms as pink and white as her own complexion, within four elm-boards with a brass plate upon the cover. Now, therefore, there was a new situation to face, and Mrs. Baxter was regarding it with apprehension."