Perhaps we, in this country, are more than others averse to bowing down to the authority of great names. Still it cannot be denied that peritus in arte sua, the man who has made any art or science his particular study is and always must be an authority. We may examine a question for ourselves, or try an experiment in physics, but we must admit that the chances are a hundred to one that, after having tried it, we shall find only the predicted result. It is in this sense that we have brought forward the authority of majorities, and of great names in the present question, not as deciding the matter, "What is the truth?" but as justly producing on the minds of unprejudiced persons a strong presumption in favor of the justness of such conclusions. If it be said that the undoubtedly great minds which have embraced the Catholic religion are no proof, or even presumption, that the Catholic religion is true, we reply, Be it so; they do, however, afford a strong presumption of the sincerity of such converts when, as is generally the case, it can be shown that they embraced the Catholic faith against the force of early prejudice and to their own temporal loss. And it affords also a strong persuasion that the reasons which they had for the change of religion must have been weighty, since they wrought conviction in the minds of men well capable of judging of the force of argument, and who knew also all that could be urged on the other side. In fact, the argument in favor of the Catholic religion, drawn from the fact of the great and good men who have in every age embraced it, is similar to that which is very commonly brought forward in favor of the general evidences of Christianity, from the fact of their having wrought conviction in the mind of St. Paul or of Sir Isaac Newton.
The large number of conversions taking place every day amongst ourselves, not merely of the unlearned but even more in proportion, of the more educated and the more morally elevated, and the special weight which the submission of persons specially eminent for moral and intellectual gifts carries with it, ought to have, and indeed are found to produce at least this effect on sensible men, that it makes them pause to consider, and try to assign a sufficient reason for such conversions. Anyhow, whether any reason good or bad can be assigned for this movement, it is a fact, to which no one who enters into society can shut his eyes. Conversion to the Catholic religion is like an epidemic; there is no neighborhood or profession, scarcely a family in any class of society in which conversions to the Catholic Church have not taken place. I enter a railway car or a steamboat; I go to a dinner party; I stand up with my partner at a ball; and, in the pauses of the busy hum of voices or of musical sounds, I become aware that my opposite neighbors are actually discussing with interest, attacking or defending, the Catholic religion.
Going into town by the cars the other day, I met my uncle Joe in a brown study. "Good morning, sir! why so gloomy?"
"Why, John, my eldest son, has become a Papist, sir; sorry for it; a good, steady lad, but he has got into the hands of the priests, sir; I fear it is all up with him. I suppose he will shave his head next, leave his boots at home, and turn out like one of those bare-footed friars we used to see in Belgium last fall."
"Well, but, uncle," say I, "it cannot be helped, you see; you would not have the boy, as you call him—though he is two and twenty if he is a day—go against his conscience and remain a nominal Protestant to please you." "No, sir," he replies, "you have me there; I stand up for the principle of liberty of conscience, sir. Yes, sir, liberty of conscience. I know all about it, civil and religious liberty, which the fathers of our glorious republic established once and for all time as the palladium of our constitution. But how the boy can fancy the Catholic religion to be true, and make a matter of conscience to join it, that is my puzzle, I can tell you."
"Well, but my dear sir, it is no flattery to say to you, your son is no fool. He knows what he is about; for his age, there is not a more promising young fellow at our bar; only last week old Judge Davis complimented him for the way in which he had taken a very complicated case in equity and literally turned it inside out and held it up for inspection. He is not a child; he has cut all his teeth, and is not one to be led by the nose by any man, be he priest or lawyer—you don't walk round a Yankee lawyer in a hurry."
"Well, that is true," said my uncle. "He has as sound a head as any lad I know, and at school and college he was always well up. Whatever has turned his head to Papacy? Do you know I sometimes think it is what they call a monomania—like the man who was sensible enough in everything else but mad on one point, and thought he was a pump; and another took to his room and could not be got to go out because he thought he was made of glass, and would not stand jostling in the streets. Then think of Joanna Southcote, Joe Smith, and the rest. My word! there is no end of the aberrations of the human intellect."
"Well, sir," I replied, "I don't think that will hold water, for you and I know a dozen sensible, first-rate men who have turned Catholics; no fanatics, but cool-headed men of business, good neighbors, good husbands, honest men. There is Mr. A., Judge B., General C., within the present year. They are not men to make a serious change, which they know would set every one talking and criticising them, unless they knew well what they were about, and could give reasons for the change and stand a little criticism."
"Well, that is nothing but common sense," he replied; "still I am puzzled, I can tell you, to think why they did it."