With Readers and Correspondents [pp. 420-427]

1887.] WITH READERS AND CORRE-SPONADEN7. 4
grim's Progress had a powerful influence on me, which has ever remained-a book
full of truth, of graphic narrative, proving the need of repentance for sin.
I cannot remember that when I stood before the church committee for exami nation, to be admitted to membership, I had a single heresy. I believed what
Christ revealed, and I repented of my sins. This belief and repentance I af firmed and explained to the committee with the deepest sincerity, keeping no thing back. I was accepted and deemed worthy of baptism and membership, and
was accordingly baptized.
This was a truly marvellous awakening in my life; the powerful graces then
received, and the emotions aroused within me, were the chief cause of my becom ing a Catholic afterwards.
I had nothing of Congregationalism in particular, but only Christianity in gen eral, yet orthodox, as we say of it in New England to distinguish it from Uni tarianism: holding the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Redemption as taught in
Scripture. On the hot points of human depravity, predestination, and justifica tion by faith alone, the church committee did not examine me much. I was
sound and right on them, in the Catholic sense. As to eternal punishment, I be lieved it as firmly as Bunyan, and the necessity of escaping fromn it by faith and
works. No revival meeting had anything to do with my joining; the human side
of the work was all my own. I felt perfectly satisfied, and was convinced I had
the true Christian religion. And I don't think that I held explicitly to any error.
My whole frame of mind was shaped by the Scripture. I remember that I believed
firmly in baptismal regeneration, because the Lord said he that believeth and
is baptized shall be saved. I didn't knowenough of the Catholic Church to form
any belief about it.
When, then, did my mind begin to stir on that question? In my last year at
college, to which I went shortly after " becoming a Christian." Somewhere about
Christmas a college mate, a member of the Baptist Church, called me aside and
said: " I very much fear that I am not right in my religion, and that the Catholic
Church is true." I replied: "The matter is well worth investigating." It flashed
upon me that perhaps my friend's doubts were well founded. I began to study
the big question that very evening. The very next morning I went to the miserable little Catholic book-store of the town, kept by a lame man, and bought a Catholic prayer-book, Key if Heaven, also The Misszon-Book of St. Liguori, Challoner's Catholzc Chrzisian Instructed, and the Little Catechism. This last was
the first Catholic book I ever read.. Challoner I read through and found of immense help. The Mission-Book helped me greatly; I learned from it that the
Catholic religion is primarily interior. I expected to find it mainly external. I
found that for every ceremony or practice sanctioned by the church there was a
reason that was interior and intrinsic, and that the interior was the primary object
of the exterior. Right after this I read the Poae and Maguire discussion and
found it useful. It was loaned me by a young Catholic friend at college, since
then become a man of much distinction.
Another impulse, and at about the same time, came from the history class. Our
professor, a learned and distinguished man, was also honest with us. In the
course of my private study I came to know that in the fifth century the pope was
universally recognized in Christendom as the successor of St. Peter; this was the
teaching, too, of our professor. Then I asked myself, Can I suppose an error on
such a fundamental point believed by all Christians, universally? That cannot be.
All Christendom cannot err. They could not so err even humanly speaking; four
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