e
reason is this: It would concern me, Gentlemen, were I supposed to have
got up my opinions for the occasion. This, indeed, would have been no
reflection on me personally, supposing I were persuaded of their truth,
when at length addressing myself to the inquiry; but it would have
destroyed, of course, the force of my testimony, and deprived such
arguments, as I might adduce, of that moral persuasiveness which attends
on tried and sustained conviction. It would have made me seem the
advocate, rather than the cordial and deliberate maintainer and witness,
of the doctrines which I was to support; and, though it might be said to
evidence the faith I reposed in the practical judgment of the Church, and
the intimate concurrence of my own reason with the course she had
authoritatively sanctioned, and the devotion with which I could promptly
put myself at her disposal, it would have cast suspicion on the validity
of reasonings and conclusions which rested on no independent inquiry, and
appealed to no past experience. In that case it might have been plausibly
objected by opponents that I was the serviceable expedient of an
emergency, and never, after all, could be more than ingenious and adroit
in the management of an argument which was not my own, and which I was
sure to forget again as readily as I had mastered it. But this is not so.
The views to which I have referred have grown into my whole system of
thought, and are, as it were, part of myself. Many changes has my mind
gone through: here it has known no variation or vacillation of opinion,
and though this by itself is no proof of the truth of my principles, it
puts a seal upon conviction, and is a justification of earnestness and
zeal. Those principles, which I am now to set forth under the sanction of
the Catholic Church, were my profession at that early period of my life,
when religion was to me more a matter of feeling and experience than of
faith. They did but take greater hold upon me, as I was introduced to the
records of Christian Antiquity, and approached in sentiment and desire to
Catholicism; and my sense of their correctness has been increased with the
events of every year since I have been brought within its pale.

And here I am brought to a second and more important reason for referring,
on this occasion, to the conclusions at which Protestants have arrived on
the subject of Liberal Education; and it is as follows: Let it be
observed, then, that the principle