f; your antecedents, your existing influence,
are a pledge to us that what you may determine will be the
determination of a multitude. Numbers, too, for whom you cannot
properly be said to speak, will be moved by your authority or your
arguments; and numbers, again, who are of a school more recent
than your own, and who are only not your followers because they
have outstripped you in their free speeches and demonstrative acts
in our behalf, will, for the occasion, accept you as their
spokesman. There is no one anywhere--among ourselves, in your own
body, or, I suppose, in the Greek Church--who can affect so vast a
circle of men, so virtuous, so able, so learned, so zealous, as
come, more or less, under your influence; and I cannot pay them
all a greater compliment than to tell them they ought all to be
Catholics, nor do them a more affectionate service than to pray
that they may one day become such....

I recollect well what an outcast I seemed to myself when I took
down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius
or St. Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the
contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholicism, I kissed
them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all
that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the
glorious saints who bequeathed them to the Church, I said to the
inanimate pages, "You are now mine, and I am now yours, beyond any
mistake." Such, I conceive, would be the joy of the persons I
speak of if they could wake up one morning and find themselves
possessed by right of Catholic traditions and hopes, without
violence to their own sense of duty; and certainly I am the last
man to say that such violence is in any case lawful, that the
claims of conscience are not paramount, or that any one may
overleap what he deliberately holds to be God's command, in order
to make his path easier for him or his heart lighter.

I am the last man to quarrel with this jealous deference to the
voice of our conscience, whatever judgment others may form of us
in consequence, for this reason, because their case, as it at
present stands, has as you know been my own. You recollect well
what hard things were said against us twenty-five years ago which
we knew in our hearts we did not deserve. Hence, I am now in the