are the notions that heretics, the enemies of God, the children of Satan, may entertain of our sayings and doings? Are we not the children of the kingdom, and shall we not run and exult to behold the bridegroom as he cometh forth from his chamber? Command us to hold our peace, and the very stones would cry out. Does not the inspired Psalmist call upon the trees to clap their hands; upon all nature, inanimate, animate, and rational, to rejoice and exult aloud? How then shall we restrain our joy when we speak of the Church, our blessed Mother, and of the graces we receive through her from her celestial Spouse,of the sweet repose we experience, after years of wandering, in laying our head upon her maternal bosom, or feeling ourselves locked in her affectionate embrace, lest some sneering heretic or infidel shall call us extravagant, and be led to disregard our words? Just as if the joy that gushes from our hearts, the love that beams from our eyes, and speaks in every look, tone, and gesture, were not the very thing which, of all others, must most effectually touch his soul, and disarm his face of its sneer? We mean no censure upon Mr. Capes; we only wish to express, in the most forcible manner we are able, that cool, measured statements are not those the most consonant to our feelings, nor those most likely to persuade heretics that we who are converts have found in the Church all, and far more than all, we expected, or than was promised us. There is not one of us who would not find the language of the queen of Sheba to Solomon quite too cold and weak to express how much more we have found than we looked for, when we sought admission to the Catholic communion. "The word is true which I heard in my country of thy virtues and wisdom. I did not believe them that told it, until I came, and my eyes had seen, and I had proved that scarce one half of thy wisdom had been told me thou hast exceeded thy fame with thy virtues. Happy are thy men, and happy are thy servants, who stand always before thee, and hear thy wisdom. Blessed be the Lord thy God, who hath been pleased to set thee on his throne."*

Nevertheless, Mr. Capes sometimes forgets the restraint he imposes upon himself. The following, which is the concluding paragraph of his work, is written with deep feeling, and is very beautiful, as well as very true.

"Truly can I say with the patriarch, The Lord is in this place, and I knew it not. This is no other but the house of God, and the

2 Paralip. ix. 5-8.

gate of heaven.' The Catholic Church can be nothing less than the spiritual body of Jesus Christ. Nothing less than that adorable Presence, before which the angels veil their faces, can make her what she is, to those who are within her fold. Argument is needed no longer. The scoffings of the infidel, the objections of the Protestant, the sneers of the man of the world, pass over their heads as clouds over a mountain-peak, and leave them calm and undisturbed, with their feet resting on the Rock of Ages. They know in whom they have believed. They have passed from speculation to action, and found that all is real, genuine, life-giving, and enduring. Such, with all my sense of the awful mysteriousness of the world which is still invisible, of the fallaciousness of human knowledge, and of the argumentative points which controversy will ever urge against the claims of the Catholic Church, such is the result of my experience of her aspect towards those who repose upon her bosom, in order that they may gaze upon the lineaments of her countenance. As a child that rests upon its parent's bosom, pressed to her heart with a tenderness that nothing less than a mother can bestow, and from that place of peace and security looks up into her eyes, and there reads the love which is its sweetest joy, so do I watch the aspect of her who has clasped me in her arms, and sustains me that I should not fall, and know that she is indeed the mother of my soul. I know only one fear, the fear that my heart may be faithless to Him who has bestowed on me this unspeakable blessing; I know only one mystery, which the more I think upon it, the more incomprehensible does it appear, the mystery of that calling which brought me into this home of rest, while millions and millions are still driven to and fro in the turbulent ocean of the world, without rudder and without compass, without helmsman and without anchor, to drift before the gale upon the fatal shore.” p. 72.

The thought with which this closes is often in the mind of the convert, and is a mystery which grows upon us the more we meditate on it, because, while we see and acknowledge our guilt in remaining as we did outside of the Church, we know that it was no merit of ours, it was no virtue in us, that brought us into her communion. Not to us the glory, but to the free grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Mr. Capes first considers the influence of Catholicity in regard to intellectual freedom. We extract a paragraph or two.

"It is commonly supposed, indeed, that a man of sense and intellectual courage cannot believe the dogmas of Catholicism without violating the first principles of reasoning, and enslaving his judg ment at the beck of a designing priesthood. So far from this being

the case, I find myself compelled to act in the very opposite direction. I cannot help believing the truth of Catholicism in general, nor can I perceive the slightest violation of the laws of reasoning in any one of its separate doctrines. Granting the truth of Christianity as a Divine revelation, my reason forces me to be convinced that no one form of Protestantism can possibly be true. So far as argument is concerned, I can see and feel the difficulties which exist in the way of the reception of the Christian religion as Divine, and even of belief in any religion whatsoever, natural or revealed; but when once the question of the origin of Christianity is settled, though I can see and feel arguments against the Church of Rome, and admit that, so far as they go, they are difficulties which must be solved, yet I can see nothing in favor of any doctrinal Protestantism whatsoever; and I can no more avoid believing in the exclusive claims of the Church of Rome, than I can help believing in the deductions of physical astronomy or of electricity. The argument in favor of Rome is precisely similar to the reasonings which establish the great facts of any purely human science, which is based upon probabilities, and not on mathematical certainties. On such morally proved sciences, whether physical, domestic, social, or political, the whole course of our daily existence is conducted. We neither eat, drink, move, talk, read, buy, sell, grieve, rejoice, or, in a word, act for a moment as reasonable creatures, except on the supposition that certain general ideas are true, and must be acted upon, although not one of them can be proved with all the strictness of a mathematical proposition. Yet no man in his senses calls this an intellectual bondage, or wonders that people can devote their whole lives to a course of conduct against which some difficulties can be alleged, though the balance of probabilities is decidedly in its favor.

"And just such is my experience of the effect of a belief in the infallibility of the Catholic Church on my daily moral and spiritual existence. I grant that there are some difficulties to be urged against Christianity, and that the proof of the infallibility of Rome is not a mathematical proof; but nevertheless, I cannot help perceiving that the balance of proof is undeniably in favor of Christianity and of the Catholic Church, and therefore I cannot help acting myself in accordance with that balance, and no more believe or feel that I am intellectually a slave, than when I believe that I am at this moment awake, though it is impossible to prove that I am not asleep and dreaming. Many people imagine that a Catholic lives and moves with a sort of sense of intellectual discomfort, with a half-admitted consciousness that he is the victim of a delusion; that he dreads the light of criticism and argument, and is afraid of having his opinions honestly and rigorously canvassed. For my own part, I can most solemnly assert, that, from the moment I entered the Catholic Church,

NEW SERIES.

VOL. IV. NO. III.

43

I felt like a man who has just shattered the fetters which have impeded his movements from his childhood. I experienced a sensation of intellectual relief, to which I believe every conscientious Protestant to be an utter stranger. So far from feeling as if I had renounced the great privileges of humanity, and subjugated myself to a debasing servitude, I was conscious that now, for the first time, my faculties had fair play, that I was no longer in bondage to shams, forms of speech, pious frauds, exploded fables, youthful prejudices, or the impudent fabrications of baseless authority. Reason, like a young eagle for the first time floating forth from its mountain nest, and trusting itself with no faltering wing to the boundless expanse of ether around, above, and below, rejoiced in her new-found powers, and looked abroad upon the mighty universe of material and immaterial being, with that unflinching gaze with which the soul dares to look, when conscious that the God who made her has, at length, set her free. To tell me, at such a time, that I was enslaving my reason by that very act which enabled her to assert her supremacy, or that I was violating truth and common sense, by embracing the most probable of two momentous alternatives, I should have counted a folly not worthy to be refuted. And such have I felt it to this day. I am conscious that I have embraced one vast, harmonious system, which alone, of all the religions of mankind, is precisely what it pretends to be, and nothing less and nothing more. I behold before me a mighty body of doctrine and practice, self-consistent in all its parts, cohering by rigid logical deductions, and held together by certain moral laws, which are as universally applied in every conceivable contingency, as is the physical law of gravity throughout the visible universe. Complicated and varied as it is, and diverse in nature as are the many elements which go to make up its far-stretching whole, I can detect no flaw in the structure, no incompatibility of one feature with another, no tendency to decay, no token of failure in accomplishing all that it really professes to accomplish. I find every thing to charm and invigorate my intellect. If I am enthralled, it is in a bondage to truth; if I am fascinated, it is by the spell of faultless beauty." - pp. 6-8.

The Protestant, having himself no faith in his sect, concludes that we have none in the Church, and understanding very well that one is not free who is bound to believe whatever a sect, which neither is nor is believed to be infallible, teaches or commands him to believe, he concludes that we must both be and feel ourselves in mental bondage. But he falls in this into the sophism called by logicians transitio a genere ad genus, or concluding from one order to another, forgetting that the conclusion, to be valid, must always be in the same order with the prem

ises. The Church is not in the sectarian order, is not simply the sect claiming infallibility and supreme authority; and Catholics believing their Church infallible and supreme differ essentially from Protestants disbelieving their sect, and well aware that it is fallible and liable to command what is false and wicked. Supposing the Church to be what she claims to be, there is no mental bondage in being held to believe whatever she teaches, and supposing us really to believe that she is what she claims to be, we cannot feel ourselves in mental bondage in being so held. The difficulty the Protestant imagines for us grows out of his supposition that the Church is for us what his sect is for him, and that at bottom we no more believe her than he does it. But this, luckily, is his mistake. Believing with us does not mean professing to believe, and actually doubting. We believe our Church infallible, Divinely commissioned, speaking in the name of God, and therefore that in believing and obeying her we are believing and obeying God, which is not slavery, but freedom; for God is truth and justice, our Maker, and our rightful Sovereign. Hence, Mr. Capes only asserts what reason itself asserts, when he says that one never enjoys, never knows, mental freedom till he becomes a Catholic. In becoming a Catholic we throw off the despotism of opinion, of passion, of caprice, and submit ourselves to the authority of God, and have his truth, his veracity, his word, as our authority for believing. We are freed from bondage, emancipated, and admitted as citizens into the commonwealth of Christ, and made partakers of the liberty of the children of God. On this point every convert's experience fully confirms all, and more than all, Mr. Capes has said.

But while we accept heartily all Mr. Capes says in favor of the freedom possessed and felt by the Catholic, we cannot help thinking that he has made some concessions to his former brethren which he was not required to make, and which may be turned with considerable force against him. He concedes that there are real difficulties in the way of admitting the truth of Christianity itself, and also in the way of admitting Catholicity as its true and only form. He makes the question, aside from the donum fidei, or gift of faith, between Christianity and infidelity, and between Catholicity and Protestantism, to be a balancing of probabilities, and concedes that in becoming a Catholic he was only "embracing the most probable of two momentous alternatives." Here is evidently an admission that unbelief and heresy are probable, although, by far, less probable than Cath