side, it seems more natural that you should now look first at what the majority of Christians hold; at any rate, that you should not make up your mind without doing this; that you should not, as I said at the start, close the subject because you cannot accept what some comparatively small number believe, and conclude that the faith of the great remainder is substantially the same, or, at any rate, equally untenable.

It seems natural, too, to look, and to look first, into the belief of that great body of believers which has, in its organization and outward form at least, come down from the first days of the Christian religion itself; which goes by the name of no human founder or reformer. Of course this great body, this parent stock of Christianity, may have corrupted or changed the faith which Christ gave it in the beginning; may have introduced something false or immoral, or at any rate merely human, into that faith; may have usurped powers which do not belong to it; may have done something, in short, which it was right to protest against, and have acted in such a way that the only effectual protest was to abandon it, and start in a manner afresh. But it is not reasonable to take for granted that it did so. The burden of proof rather rests on those who claim that such was the case.

And it is not quite fair to take their own

accounts of the reasons which led them to separate; of the doctrines which the Catholic Church taught, and still teaches, which they say they could not swallow. Better and fairer to find out if they might not have been mistaken, to say the least. When a son leaves his father's house after some quarrel, you don't simply take his word about the quarrel; it is only fair to see what account the father will give of it. Indeed, generally the presumption is in his favor.

Do not then, believe implicitly all that you have been accustomed to hear about the corruptions, errors, idolatries, etc., of the old and original Christian Church. I do not blame you much if you have done so hitherto; the false, and to Catholics really absurd, current notions about our faith have been held and circulated so constantly among Protestants that it can hardly be a matter of surprise that most nonCatholics take them for granted.

All I ask of you is to admit that the question may have two sides to it. The difficulty is that most Englishmen and Americans, in making up their minds as to whether they can be Christians, bar off the Catholic Church at the start from their inquiry. They take for granted that she is wrong; they feel as sure of this as they do that the earth goes round the sun, not the sun round the earth. They think both these

matters were

ago.

settled three hundred years

"" What! they will say, "be a Catholic? Why, you might as well go in for astrology, or hold that everything is made up of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Why, the thing is exploded; it is a relic of the dark ages; it is just a superstition which no intelligent man can hang on to. It is a wonder that it has such a hold in this glorious nineteenth (and almost twentieth) century."

All they will admit is, that this superstition may be of some use to poor ignorant people, who are too brutish or stupid to accept anything better; the consolation they give themselves when some friend of theirs does embrace this old and foolish religion, and perhaps even becomes a priest, to teach it to others, is, "Well, after all, you will be able to do some good to those poor people whom we cannot get hold of."

How often do we hear such things said, even to our face! But in spite of this seeming confidence of superiority, there is one thing that surprises them, and that they do not like to talk about; and that is, that it is rather the educated and intelligent ones among them that become Catholics, whereas it is among the poorer and more ignorant among us that they find ones of whom they get hold. It looks as if

the Catholic faith were more attractive to intelligent people than the Protestant one; or rather, it would look so if that were not, of course, too impossible an idea to be entertained.

Another thing, too, seems a little strange: that some inducement in the way of material aid or social position seems usually required to make a Catholic abandon his faith; whereas the Protestant who becomes a Catholic has, as a rule, to sacrifice something for his convictions. It looks, you see, as if the convictions were stronger one way than the other.

Of course it may be said in explanation of the first of these two curious facts, by those who are willing to admit them as facts, that the intelligent Protestants who become Catholics are what are known at the present day as "cranks"; that they are not people of plain common sense, but students who have puzzled themselves by reasoning, or fanciful persons whose imagination has been excited. This was what Festus said to St. Paul (Acts xxvi. 24): "Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad." Paul, however, has generally been accepted, even by those who are not Christians, as a man of good sound intellect, to say the least. And converts to Catholicity generally, even in our times, manage to keep out of the asylum, in spite of their friends' predictions to the contrary.

To the second, it will be urged that Catholics must gain and Protestants lose by a change, because Protestants are as a whole better off, financially and socially, than Catholics. This is true; but still it does not explain why the convert to the Catholic Church should make the sacrifice which he does, or why Protestants, having presumably the truth, and certainly the money in their possession, should have such unsatisfactory results in their apostolate among well-instructed Catholics.

Now, all I would ask is that you would, just for a moment, admit that there may be some good solid reasons which have influenced the many quite intellectual and sensible Protestants who have become Catholics to make the change, in spite of the sacrifice which it involved.

And I may add, that it may be worth while even for those who have almost lost faith in Christianity, as being out of harmony with reason, to see if there is not a chance that something still remains to be said on the other side; to inquire, before giving up altogether, whether there be not a form of Christianity about which they know little or nothing, though they have always supposed it to be quite irrational and inadmissible, which after all may be not only reasonable in itself, but also in accordance with