eally
believe.

There are some outside the Church who feel and believe that the Catholic
Church is the true Church, and yet they do not become Catholics, because
there are so many difficulties in the way. For example, they have been
brought up in another religion, and all their friends, relatives, or
associates are opposed to the Catholic religion. Their business, their
social life, their worldly interests will all suffer if they become
Catholics. So, although they feel they should at once embrace the true
religion, they keep putting off till death comes and finds them outside
the Church--and most probably guilty of other mortal sins. Such persons
cannot be saved, for they reject all the graces God bestows upon them. A
very common fault with such people is to excuse this conduct by saying:
Oh! I was brought up in the Protestant religion, and everyone ought to
live in the religion in which he was brought up. Let me ask: If persons
were brought up with some bodily deformity that their parents neglected
to have remedied while they were young, would they not use every means
themselves to have the deformity removed as soon as they became old
enough to see and understand their misfortune? In like manner, if
unfortunately parents bring up their children in a false religion--that
is, with spiritual deformities, it is the duty of the children to
embrace the true religion as soon as they know it. Again persons will
say: Oh, I believe one religion as good as another; we are all
Christians, and all trying to serve God. If one religion is as good as
another, why did not Our Lord allow the old religions--false or true--to
remain? If one man says a thing is black and another says it is white,
they cannot both be right, for a thing cannot be black and white at the
same time. Only one can be right; and, if we are anxious about the color
of the object, we must try to find which one is right. Just in the same
way all the religions that claim to be Christian contradict one another;
one says a thing is false and another says it is true: one says Our Lord
taught so and so and another says He did not. Now since it is very
important for us to know which is right, we must find out which is
really the Church Our Lord established; and when we have found it we
will know that all the other pretended Christian religions must be
false. Our Lord has given us marks by which we can know His Church, as
we saw while speaking of the marks of the Church; an