ve can I have in misleading
you? Not temporal reward, since I seek not your money, but your soul, for
which Jesus Christ died. I could not hope for an eternal reward by
deceiving you, for I would thereby purchase for myself eternal
condemnation by gaining proselytes at the expense of truth.

This, friendly reader, is my only motive. I feel in the depth of my heart
that, in possessing Catholic faith, I hold a treasure compared with which
all things earthly are but dross. Instead of wishing to bury this treasure
in my breast, I long to share it with you, especially as I lose no part of
my spiritual riches by communicating them to others.

It is to me a duty and a labor of love to speak the truth concerning my
venerable Mother, so much maligned in our days. Were a tithe of the
accusations which are brought against her true, I would not be attached to
her ministry, nor even to her communion, for a single day. I know these
charges to be false. The longer I know her, the more I admire and venerate
her. Every day she develops before me new spiritual charms.

Ah! my dear friend, if you saw her as her children see her, she would no
longer appear to you as typified by the woman of Babylon. She would be
revealed to you, "Bright as the sun, fair as the moon;" with the beauty of
Heaven stamped upon her brow, glorious "as an army in battle array." You
would love her, you would cling to her and embrace her. With her children,
you would rise up in reverence "and call her blessed."

Consider what you lose and what you gain in embracing the Catholic
religion.

Your loss is nothing in comparison with your gain. You do not surrender
your manhood or your dignity or independence or reasoning powers. You give
up none of those revealed truths which you may possess already. The only
restraint imposed upon you is the restraint of the Gospel, and to this you
will not reasonably object.

You gain everything that is worth having. You acquire a full and connected
knowledge of God's revelation. You get possession of the whole truth as it
is in Jesus. You no longer see it in fragments, but reflected before you
in all its beauty, as in a polished mirror. While others are outside
criticising the architecture of the temple, you are inside worshiping the
divine Architect and saying devoutly with the Psalmist: "I have loved O
Lord, the beauty of Thy house and the place where Thy glory dwelleth."
While others from without find in the stained-glass wind