Although he was to be embraced by the ecclesiastical establishment, and in manner often seemed more priestly than the priests, he was not himself of that establishment. His central position was an orthodox one, but his stance within the English Church was critical and combative--his Thoughts After Lambeth...is marked by what is in places an ironic polemic against the fatuities of ecclesiastical utterance. His characteristic position remained the same: to adopt the tone and coloration of his surroundings, while at the same time preserving a skeptical detachment from them. In any case, he knew too much to be impressed by the conventional formulations which he attacked in his pamphlet, just as his own religion was so haunted by private obsessions that he could not accede to a conventional piety.
--Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984), p. 181.
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