the triumph of the Gospel, and to the glory of our great God and
Saviour Jesus Christ, by filling your hearts with the love of truth,
and by leading you in the way of true religion.

It was in the thirty-third year of my age, in the present year,
(1826,) that I openly embraced and professed the Protestant religion,
after having given it the most serious and attentive examination,
and being convinced that it was indeed the true religion of Christ,
agreeable, in every respect, to the revelations of his Gospel.

Like you, my dear children, I was born in the Romish church; but birth
has, in fact, very little to do with religion; the utmost that it can
effect is to predispose the mind, or to serve as a pretext to timid,
interested, or indifferent persons, to justify their external
adherence to a form of worship in which their hearts do not unite.

As our Saviour declares to his disciple Peter, it is not flesh or
blood that can make known to us the true God, the Creator, Preserver,
and Saviour of men. Faith, through which alone we can become children
of God, and true members of the church of Christ, is a gift of the
Holy Spirit, and by no means transmitted to us with our existence
by our parents. St. John teaches us this when he says, "As many as
received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to
them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of
the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." John, 1:
12, 13.

Thus you see that we are neither Catholics nor Protestants by birth;
and it is a great error for any one to feel himself bound to either
church, because he has been born within its pale. Religion, like every
thing else, must be studied and examined; and no one is truly a member
of a church, further than as he understands and acknowledges its
doctrines. His adherence on any other ground only proves him
credulous, ignorant, and superstitious; the slave of prejudice and
habit.

As for me, my children, although born in the Romish church, I can
assure you that I never participated in its belief. It would be
foreign to the end I have in view, to relate here the various
circumstances of my childhood and youth, which preserved me from being
brought into the bosom of the Catholic church by the usual rites
and ceremonies. God so ordered it, that I made no vow by which _I
might_[5] have afterwards felt myself bound to the church of Rome.

[Footnote 5: "_I might have_," but