Malcolm Muggeridge, with a Fabian Socialist upbringing, once an atheist, a career journalist, at one time hearty drinker and womanizer, at age seventy-nine surrendered his will to the Lord. This gadfly of British letters, an eloquent peddler of words, gathered up his contradictions and beliefs in November 1982, marched down to a small chapel in Hurst Green, Sussex, and, with his wife, became a member of the Catholic Church. His decision to convert was inspired in part by the life and witness of Mother Teresa. Commenting on the experience, this mellowed old iconoclast said there was "a sense of home-coming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that has long been ringing, of finding a place at a table that has long been left vacant."