It is a fact, to which the Catholic heart cannot recur without emotions of the deepest gratitude, that Christ's holy church is ever gathering some of the select out of the mad waves of heresy and schism around us into the safety of her maternal bosom. It is a fact, too, which every conscientious and thoughtful Protestant must view with feelings of disquietude and insecurity, that men of unimpeachable piety and learning are thus ever leaving the external wilderness where they have walked with him, and seek and find true refuge in the Catholic ark of God.
The number of these converts it seems almost impossible to estimate. There can be but little doubt, however, that it far exceeds the reckonings of the denominations out of which they come, and equally surpasses our own most sanguine calculations. Reliable statistics show us that within the last fifty years no less than forty-one clergymen of the American Episcopal Church alone have laid down the honors and emoluments they there enjoyed, and have espoused poverty and insignificance with the Catholic faith. [Footnote 145] Many of these were men of eminence in their former sphere of action, and one, at least, held the highest and most responsible position which his co-religionists could bestow upon him. Some of them have risen since their conversion to posts of ecclesiastical dignity and power. Others have died and rest with God. All of them, with but few exceptions, have remained faithful, and have endorsed, in life and in death, the wisdom and sincerity of that step which brought them, after many wanderings, into the apostolic fold.
[Footnote 145: See Church Review, July, 1860, p. 254. There have been several conversions from the Episcopal clergy since that date.]
How far the clerical ranks of other sects of Protestants in the United States have been invaded by God's converting grace, no data that we can command are able to determine. Our personal recollections of their various ministers, who at one time and another have laid down their own will for the will of Christ, lead us to the belief that the number from each will fall little short of that contributed by the denomination to which we first referred. And as for laymen, they have come to us from every known religious name and creed, and full as often from no name and creed at all, until the throng has swelled from hundreds into tens of thousands, and gone beyond the possibility of our enumeration or discovery. [Footnote 146]
[Footnote 146: Judging from the statistics of the past few years in the dioceses of New York, the number of converts in the United States must exceed 30,000.—Ed. C.W.]
Moreover, this work is on the increase. Year by year, almost, the church is doubling on herself in these triumphs of her toil. Where individuals once tremblingly isolated themselves from old associations, and cut the vital cord of earthly friendships and familiarities by submitting to her guidance, now families and communities fly together to her arms for safety; while those upon whose personal decisions her labors and the grace of God seemed to make no impression, have ceased to persecute and almost ceased to ban those who have followed [{460}] her, and recognize conversion from Protestantism to Catholicity as a change equally legitimate and rational with conversion from idolatry to God. Nay, more: the very brain of Protestant America itself is sloughing off the narrow coils of illogical and degrading error which three hundred years of folly and of falsehood had woven round it under the name of Christian doctrine; and, in spite of its self-conceived antagonism between "Rome or Reason," is drinking in long draughts of Catholic theology, and pouring out broadcast over this great hemisphere the fundamental tenets of the Roman faith as the indisputable truths of human reason and divine philosophy.
The tide of popular prejudice thus turning, and the way thus opened to the American intellect by the instrumentality of those who claim to be her adversaries, it is no arrogation of prophetic foresight to predict that the progress of the church in this country must, in the future, be rapid beyond all precedent, and that the age may not be far distant when this vast "Continent of Mary" shall, with one heart and under one name, obey the Holy Spouse of Mary's Son.
When such realities are around us and such possibilities before us, the study of those mental and moral changes in the individual by which all has been done that is done, and by which also all that shall be done must be accomplished, cannot be uninteresting or unprofitable. No religious subject of so much practical importance to non-Catholics is, probably, so little understood among them; and of none have more false definitions been given or more inaccurate theories been entertained. Even Catholics themselves have generally failed in their attempts to realize the logical processes through which the Protestant mind must, consciously or unconsciously, find its way before it can receive Catholic truth with the dear, living faith of a Catholic heart. It is to correct these errors and to scatter these difficulties, as well as to justify seeming inconsistencies, and above all, to assist, if possible, the wavering minds of some who long for a light which they know not how or where to find, that we devote these pages to a discussion of those changes in the human soul which make up the actual conversion from Protestantism to the Catholic Church.
The materials for this discussion are both abundant and satisfactory The first of the four works upon our list is from the pen of Dr. Ives, who was for more than twenty years the Protestant Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of North-Carolina, and one of the acknowledged leaders of the High church party in the United States. It is a concise and luminous rehearsal of the reasons which led him to abandon his exalted ecclesiastical station for that of a mere layman in the Catholic church, and presents a vivid picture of the "trials" and perplexities which extreme Tractarians must inevitably undergo, when the incompatibility of their position with their principles is once fully apprehended. The second is a voluminous and formal treatise on the rules of evidence as applicable to revelation, and on those fundamental axioms which underlie all legislation, human or divine. It is, obviously, what the title-page professes, the work of a legal mind which views the whole question of religion as open two, and able to abide the most thorough tests of reason and philosophy, and brings the great issues which it raises, in every case, to actual demonstration for denial. The writer, now a Catholic, was formerly a member of the so-called "Disciples;" a sect which lies on the outskirts of Christianity, and from which to Catholicity the path must have been almost as long and devious as that from infidelity itself. The author of the third is Dr. Brownson, one of the most positive of modern men; whose range of doctrinal experience has reached from Deism to an ultramontane Catholicism, and who in every phase of his religious life, has [{461}] been a living power, dealing with realities, and stripping all imaginations and delusions from the realities with which he dealt. The last is Dr. Newman's, than whom no one knows better, none can describe so well, that Via Dolorosa which all converts tread? To these, if we would, the works of Manning, Wilberforce, and others might be added, each a reflection of the changes which the inner lives of their writers underwent in the great struggle after ultimate, unquestionable truth; while, beyond even these, the inexhaustible volume of experience remains; a volume in which the dark things of these books find an infallible interpreter, and on whose hidden leaves the hand of God has written the same history of which these human pages are the reflection and the shade.
It is not an unreasonable hope, that, out of such materials, we may be able to construct an accurate definition of that work of grace which, in the convert's memory, has overshadowed and embraces all other gifts of God.