ires is
to be brought home or applied to the mind; if belief does not then
follow, the fault lies with the will."

"Well," said Charles, "I think there is a general feeling among educated
Anglicans, that the claims of the Roman Church do not rest on a
sufficiently intellectual basis; that the evidences, or notes, were well
enough for a rude age, not for this. This is what makes me despair of
the growth of Catholicism."

His companion looked round curiously at him, and then said, quietly,
"Depend upon it, there is quite evidence enough for a _moral conviction_
that the Catholic or Roman Church, and none other, is the voice of God."

"Do you mean," said Charles, with a beating heart, "that before
conversion one can attain to a present abiding actual conviction of this
truth?"

"I do not know," answered the other; "but, at least, he may have
habitual _moral certainty_; I mean, a conviction, and one only, steady,
without rival conviction, or even reasonable doubt, present to him when
he is most composed and in his hours of solitude, and flashing on him
from time to time, as through clouds, when he is in the world;--a
conviction to this effect, 'The Roman Catholic Church is the one only
voice of God, the one only way of salvation.'"

"Then you mean to say," said Charles, while his heart beat faster, "that
such a person is under no duty to wait for clearer light."

"He will not have, he cannot expect, clearer light before conversion.
Certainty, in its highest sense, is the reward of those who, by an act
of the will, and at the dictate of reason and prudence, embrace the
truth, when nature, like a coward, shrinks. You must make a venture;
faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a gift after it.
You approach the Church in the way of reason, you enter into it in the
light of the Spirit."

Charles said that he feared there was a great temptation operating on
many well-informed and excellent men, to find fault with the evidence
for Catholicity, and to give over the search, on the excuse that there
were arguments on both sides.

"It is not one set of men," answered his companion; "it is the grievous
deficiency in Englishmen altogether. Englishmen have many gifts, faith
they have not. Other nations, inferior to them in many things, still
have faith. Nothing will stand in place of it; not a sense of the beauty
of Catholicism, or of its awfulness, or of its antiquity; not an
appreciation of the sympathy which it