This aspect of Stanley's special meanings raises questions of their relationship with his inherited Christian orthodoxy. We can only decide for ourselves as to what extent we think he adhered to or discarded elements of the conventional church canon. His metaphysical interpretation of his Cookham churchyard, for example, as a heaven, a place where everyone is happy because through his art they become part of his resurrection into a state of Emersonian perfection, is unlikely to satisfy a strict theologian, particularly of the Roman faith such as Desmond Chute, who would have argued that if guilty souls were not to be condemned to hell, absolution was necessary through an ordained priest, and not through the stance Stanley assumed in his painterly interpretation.

Initially in their friendship Stanley politely acquiesced in Chute's efforts to convert him to Catholicism, but then gradually slipped away as a result of his ordeals on war service. Even so, Chute's precepts left their mark. Stanley was never able to free himself from the orthodox Catholic concept of hell, and remained unable psychologically to paint a meaningful version.

In the same context, Stanley was never able to come to terms with Original Sin nor with the dialectic of Good and Evil. After the manner of the early-Christian-era philosopher Boethius, he preferred to describe them as wickedness and theirs exponents as wicked people, and in justification of his approach even uncovered to himself the sin of all sins, that of keeping a man from the Kingdom of Heaven (i.e. preventing - or dissuading - a person from achieving their true creative potential or spiritual 'perfection', or in the more academic phrases of Professor Rudmose-Brown of Trinity Dublin, to impede the self-realization of an individual is to impede the self-realization of the Divinity.)