who was groping for the hidden treasure and
digging for the pearl of price in the high, lustrous, all-jewelled
Temple of the Lord of Hosts; who shut his eyes and speculated, when he
might open them and see. There is no absurdity, then, or inconsistency
in a person first using his private judgment and then denouncing its
use. Circumstances change duties.

But still, after all, the person in question does not, strictly
speaking, judge of the external system presented to him by his private
ideas, but he brings in the dicta of that system to confirm and to
justify certain private judgments and personal feelings and habits
already existing. Reding, for instance, felt a difficulty in determining
how and when the sins of a Christian are forgiven; he had a great notion
that celibacy was better than married life. He was not the first person
in the Church of England who had had such thoughts; to numbers,
doubtless, before him they had occurred; but these numbers had looked
abroad, and seen nothing around them to justify what they felt, and
their feelings had, in consequence, either festered within them, or
withered away. But when a man, thus constituted within, falls under the
shadow of Catholicism without, then the mighty Creed at once produces an
influence upon him. He see that it justifies his thoughts, explains his
feelings; he understands that it numbers, corrects, harmonizes,
completes them; and he is led to ask what is the authority of this
foreign teaching; and then, when he finds it is what was once received
in England from north to south, in England from the very time that
Christianity was introduced here; that, as far as historical records go,
Christianity and Catholicism are synonymous; that it is still the faith
of the largest section of the Christian world; and that the faith of his
own country is held nowhere but within her own limits and those of her
own colonies; nay, further, that it is very difficult to say what faith
she has, or that she has any,--then he submits himself to the Catholic
Church, not by a process of criticism, but as a pupil to a teacher.

In saying this, of course it is not denied, on the one hand, that there
may be persons who come to the Catholic Church on imperfect motives, or
in a wrong way; who choose it by criticism, and who, unsubdued by its
majesty and its grace, go on criticizing when they are in it; and who,
if they persist and do not learn humility, may criticize themselves out
of i