J. R. Hope, Esq., Q.C. to E. Badeley, Esq.
Abbotsford: Oct. 25, '51.
Dear B.,— … As for you, I hold your intellect to be Catholic. You cannot help it, but your habits of feeling will give you, as they gave me, more trouble than your reason. How can it be otherwise, considering how many years of training in one posture we both of us underwent? But I pray and hope for you, and that speedily, that freedom of life and limb which has been vouchsafed to me. Freedom indeed it is, for it is to breathe in all its fulness the grace and mercy of God's kingdom, instead of tasting it through the narrow lattices of texts and controversies. To believe Christ present in the Eucharist, and not adore Him—not pray Him to tarry with us and bless us. To hold the communion of saints, and yet refuse to call upon all saints—living and departed, to intercede for us with the great Head of the body in which we all are members. To accept a primacy in St. Peter, and yet hold it immaterial to the organisation of the Church. To acknowledge one Church, and then divide the unity into fragments. To attribute to the Church the power of the keys, and then deny the force of her indulgences while admitting her absolutions. To approve confession, and practically set it aside. To do and hold these and many other contradictions—what is it but to submit the mind to the fetters of a tradition which, if once made to reason, must destroy itself?… Yrs ever affly,
JAMES R. HOPE.
Abbotsford: July 16, 1852.
Dear Badeley,—I received your most kind letter yesterday. I well knew that I should hear from you, for you are an accurate observer of my birthdays— not one for many years having escaped you. This one does indeed deserve notice in one sense, as being the first on which you and I could salute each other as Catholics. May God grant that this His great gift may be fruitful to us both! Forty years of my life are already gone—of yours, more. Let us try to make the best of what may still remain. We have now all the helps which Christ's death provided for us, and all the responsibilities which come with them. 'Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina!… Yrs most affly, JAMES R. HOPE.
E. Badeley, Esq.
To the above correspondence, the following scrap from a letter of Mr. David Lewis, congratulating Mr. Hope on his conversion, may form an appropriate pendant, as showing Mr. Hope's influence in the Catholic direction previously to that event: 'I may add that I owe in part my own conversion to conversation with you, which turned me to a course of reading the end of which I did not expect. It is therefore no small joy to me to see you in the same harbour of refuge' (May 15, 1851). Some years later (in spring, 1855) it was a subject of intense joy to Mr. Hope-Scott when the news came from Rome that William Palmer had been received into the Church by Father Passaglia.
CHAPTER XXII.
1839-1869.