DR. O'LEARY AND FATHER CALLANAN.
Dr. O'Leary, though with great talents for a controversialist, always sedulously avoided the angry theme of religious disputation. Once, however, notwithstanding his declared aversion to polemics, he was led into a controversy. While he was at Cork, he received a letter through the Post Office, the writer of which, in terms expressive of the utmost anxiety, stated that he was a clergyman of the established church, on whose mind impressions favorable to the Catholic Creed had been made by some of O'Leary's sermons. The writer then professing his enmity to angry controversy, wished to seek further information on some articles of the Catholic creed. His name he forbore to reveal. O'Leary, anxious to propagate the doctrine of his Church, replied in a manner perfectly satisfactory to his anonymous correspondent. Other doubts were expressed, and dissipated, until the correspondence had extended to eight or ten long letters.
O'Leary, in joy at his supposed triumph, whispered the important secret to a few ecclesiastical confidants; among whom was his bosom friend, the Rev. Lawrence Callanan, a Francisan friar, of Cork. Their congratulations and approbation were not wanting, to urge forward the champion of orthodoxy. His arguments bore all before them; even the obstacles arising from family and legal notions, were disregarded by the enthusiastic convert, and he besought O'Leary to name a time and place, at which he might lift the mysterious vizor by which he had hitherto been concealed; and above all, have an opportunity of expressing his gratitude to his friend and teacher.
The appointed hour arrived. O'Leary arranged his orthodox wig, put on his Sunday suit of sable, and sallied forth with all collected gravity of a man fully conscious of the novelty and responsibility of the affair in which he was engaged. He arrived at the appointed place of meeting some minutes after the fixed time, and was told that a respectable clergyman awaited his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and the interference of mutual friends; to effect a reconciliation.