hope, what to prize as a real possession, and
what to regard as but loss in comparison of our inestimable gain. We
feel in common how endurance may become a privilege, and earthly
humiliation our highest honor, when sustained in the spirit, and
incurred for the sake, of the Gospel. Feeling thus alike respecting the
value of a common possession, desiring in common that all our race
should be partakers of it, making it the most earnest of our prayers
that we may receive it in its purity and employ it righteously, why
should we not help one another to apprehend it and hold it firmly? We
know, from the records of history, how the adherents of your faith have
so prized it as to sacrifice all things for it; how Catholic confessors
have borne long and painful testimony, and how Catholic martyrs have
triumphantly sustained the last proof of the strength of their
convictions. We can refer you to similar examples among those who
believed as we believe; and neither you nor we can doubt, that should
occasions of self-sacrifice again arise, every true Christian in your
body and in ours would show once more what the Gospel can do in
divesting the world of its allurements and death of its terrors. Why
then should we not congratulate each other on our common hope? Having
laid hold on the same anchor of the soul, why should we not rejoice in
each other's strength? And, differing as we do in the mode of holding a
common privilege, why should we not reason together to ascertain where
the difference lies, whence it arose, and by what means it may be
obviated? Though you and we may not regard variations in Christian faith
with an equal degree of regret and dread, we yield not to you or to any
on earth in our appreciation of the value of truth, and in our desire
that it may become the common possession of our race. Therefore it is
that we now propose to you an investigation into its principles; and
therefore it is that we seek the removal of all impediments to our
joining in hand as we already do in heart, in bringing those who are
astray to the fold of the true Shepherd.

The same means of ascertaining Divine truth are in your hands and in
ours, if, as your best writers declare and as we believe, you have free
access to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Our versions of
those Scriptures are, it is true, not exactly alike. It appears to us
that yours are, in various minor, and in some considerable points, less
correct than our own