[Footnote 67: 2 Corinthians xi. 2.]
Christian by baptism, you were also one by the gospel. The Bible was the book of your infancy; and therein you have lisped at once the secrets of this divine faith, which is of all time because it comes from eternity, and the accents of that Anglo-Saxon tongue which is of all lands because it prevails over the globe in civilizing it. Without doubt the principle of private judgment, so-called—the principle under which you have formerly lived—is the source of numberless errors; but again, let us render thanks to God, besides the Protestant principle, with the Protestants themselves there is the Christian principle. Besides private judgment, there is the action of that supernatural grace received in baptism, and the mysterious sense, of which Saint Paul speaks, "We have the mind of Christ," [Footnote 68] and of which Saint John said, "Ye have unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things." [Footnote 69] When we have read together that Scripture which has separated our ancestors, I was agreeably surprised to find that we understood its every page in the same sense, and consequently in reading it alone, and out of the Church, you have not read it without the spirit of the Church.
[Footnote 68: "Nos autem sensum Christi habemus." (i Cor. ii. 16.)]
[Footnote 69: "Sed vos unctionem habetis a Sancto, et nostis omnia. … Et non necesse habetis ut aliquis doceat vos: sed sicut unctio ejus docet vos de omnibus, et verum est, et non est mendacium." (i John ii. 20, 27.)]
Again, my child: with Baptism and the Holy Scriptures, with the sacrament and the book, you had prayer; that interior, invisible, ineffable, and withal common property; that language pre-eminently of the soul to God, and of God to the soul; that personal and direct communion of the humblest Christian with his Father in heaven.
In what, then, were you wanting? I remember what you once said to me when you were still a Protestant: "You, monk as you are, and I, Puritan that I am, are, nevertheless, of the same blood royal." You spoke truly, not because you were Puritan, but because you were Christian: we were of the same blood, both royal and divine. You were a child of the family like myself; but your cradle was carried away in a night of storm by imprudent hands from the paternal mansion—that mansion of which your eyes could no longer retain the image, of which your lips knew not the name, but which you reclaimed by your tears, by your cries, and by all the emotions of your soul. What you needed, my daughter, was to find it again, to weep upon its threshold, to embrace its old walls, and to dwell therein for ever.
You found it at Rome, in the temple of Saint Peter, the vastest and the most splendid which man has ever built to his God; but vast and splendid above all to the eyes of faith, because it is to them the image of the universal brotherhood of the children of God upon the earth. "To gather together in one the children of God that were dispersed." [Footnote 70] Coming from the great dispersion of souls, which is the work of man in Protestantism, you contemplated at last their supreme unity, which is the work of God in Catholicity. Deeply impressed and suddenly moved, you looked about you—it is your own touching account that I repeat here—you looked about you for a priest of your own tongue; not to confess to, for you did not then believe in its necessity, but to whom you could unburden your soul, and to whom you could tell your joy at having found at last a hearthstone for the heart, a home!—word so dear and sacred to your race and more necessary in the religious than in the domestic life. "This is my rest for ever and ever: here will I dwell, for I have chosen it." [Footnote 71]
[Footnote 70: "Ut filios Dei, qui erant dispersi, congregaret in unum." (John xi. 52.)]
[Footnote 71: Psalm cxxxi. 14.]