e had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace
and contentment; I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to
myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought
in my mind. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental
truths of Revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour;
but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on
that score remains to this day without interruption.

Nor had I any trouble about receiving those additional articles, which
are not found in the Anglican Creed. Some of them I believed already,
but not any one of them was a trial to me. I made a profession of them
upon my reception with the greatest ease, and I have the same ease in
believing them now. I am far of course from denying that every article
of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants,
is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that,
for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very
sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as
any one; but I have never been able to see a connexion between
apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to
any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they
are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I
understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There
of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of
difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their
relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out
a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him,
without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain
particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of
a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and
yet borne in upon our minds with most power.

People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to
believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no
difficulty in believing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic
Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this
doctrine to be part of the original revelation. It is difficult,
impossible, to imagine, I grant;--but how is it difficult to believe?
Yet Macaulay thought it so difficult to believe, that he had need of a
b