One day Ethel, the wife of Alexander James Grant, a Scottish Presbyterian pastor, left a newspaper in her husband’s office. It was a copy of the Catholic Herald and she had opened the paper strategically at a page describing the life of a seemingly obscure French nun. Ethel had converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism in 1908 and hoped that her husband would follow her across the Tiber. But that seemed unlikely: Grant was a pastor of the United Free Church of Scotland, a denomination not known for its sympathy for Catholicism. A scholarly man who knew eight languages, he served the people of Lochranza, a village on the Isle of Arran. His exposure to the Catholic Church was limited to two encounters with priests. They had offered “a few words about the Roman Religion,” he recalled, “but I was absolutely refractory to their insinuations.” Yet in an idle moment, Grant read the article, written by a Fr Taylor, which told the story of Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin, who had joined the Carmelite order before dying at the age of 24, having outwardly accomplished little of significance. The article mentioned that a full English translation of her autobiography would be published soon. Intrigued, Grant cut out the article and put it in his wallet, where it remained for about a year. Eventually one of his wife’s friends obtained from a community of nuns The Story of a Soul (albeit an older, incomplete version). At Christmas 1909, Grant returned from preaching a mission suffering from influenza. He found the book on his bedside table, and read it eagerly. “I esteemed that what had fallen into my hands was the work of a genius,” he said later. Then something truly shocking happened to the Presbyterian pastor. This is how he described it: