With Readers and Correspondents [pp. 562-569]

562 WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. [July,
until he has done away with the chief obstacle to matrimony in
his case, and fallen heir to a fortune. Mrs. Molesworth's philosophy is one not generally taught in novels. She teaches that the
material conditions of marriage cannot safely be overlooked, and
that the thoughtlessness and carelessness of parents are the causes
of the great number of unhappy marriages. French parents present no young man to their daughters who is not suitable in every
way. The French home is most exclusive, most impenetrable.
No stranger not responsibly introduced is admitted. The chaperon is an institution; and the results show that a community of
interests is as binding as a community of sentiment. Duty, after
all, becomes a habit more likely to last than the first glow of
inclination, when "in the spring a young man's fancy lightly
turns to thoughts of love."
Marriage and Giving in Marriage might profitably be considered and discussed by American fathers and mothers.
MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN.
WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.
Under this head we purpose for the future to give a variety of articles too
brief, too informal, or too piersonal for the body of the magazine. For obvious
reasons these communications will be, for the most part, unsigned.
THE STORY OF A CONVERSION.
I belong to a Connecticut family of Puritan descent, and was baptized, as an
infant, in the Congregational Church. Later on my father began to attend the
Episcopal Church, and in that church I was confirmed. In my last year at college I read McIlvaine's Evidences of Christianity, a book considered at the time
a standard Protestant authority. This book made me an infidel. My reasoning
was this: Here is the best that can be said on the evidences of Christianity; if
these are the best evidences, then I am an infidel. I was much interested at the
time in Darwin, in the works of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, in Lewes'
History of Philosophy and in his account of the Positive philosophy, and in the
articles published by the Westminster Review.
After graduating at an American college I went to Germany as a devotee of
,the Positive philosophy. Having heard of the materialistic tendencies of German
thought, I was much surprised to find that the Positive philosophy had no standing in Germany. I found, also, that thle names of Mill and Spencer, and the freethinking English school, had no great weight in that country. I became inoculated with German tendencies, and they led me to respect all religions. I found,
for example, that a German historian of Buddhism placed himself in the mood of
the Buddhist, and conceived his mission of historian as one mainly of sympathy,
not of criticism; and so with regard to other religions. Thus I came to believe