As was natural, when he sought to steer a middle course between the Scylla of royalism and the Charybdis of Jacobinism, disturbances were to be expected on both sides of the consular ship of state.
Then they passed safely through Scylla and Charybdis, past the Sirens, through the Planctae, over the island of the Sun, Trinacria and on to Corcyra again, the land of the Phaeacians, where Jason and Medea held their nuptials.
It was no time for brilliant initiative or adventurous politics; the need was to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, and a via media had to be found in church and state, at home and abroad.
After encountering many adventures in all parts of the unknown seas, among the lotuseaters and the Cyclopes, in the isles of Aeolus and Circe and the perils of Scylla and Charybdis, among the Laestrygones, and even in the world of the dead, having lost all his ships and companions, he barely escaped with his life to the island of Calypso, where he was detained eight years, an unwilling lover of the beautiful nymph.
This was fgllowed by Through Scylla and Charybdis, in which he developed his favourite view of revelation as experience; Mediaevalism, a vigorous apologia in reply to a Lenten pastoral of Cardinal Mercier, archbishop of Malines, who had attacked him as the chief exponent of Modernism; and Christianity at the Cross Roads, which emphasizes the distinction between his own position and that of the Liberal Protestants, and is of special interest for its treatment of the eschatological problems of the Gospels.