pleasant conversation with
him. His sociableness and perfect openness of expression I was quite
delighted with. He frankly acknowledged that he thought that error
had been committed on both sides in the controversy of the
Reformation between the Pope and the Anglican Church. He recommended
me to examine those points which kept me from joining the Anglican or
Roman Church before I should do anything further, as there was the
charge of schism against the Anglican Church and neglect of
discipline among the members of her communion. I told him that though
the Church of Rome may commit errors in practice, she had not
committed any in principle, and that it was easier to prune a
luxuriant tree than to revivify a tree almost exhausted of life. I
left him with an earnest invitation to call again."

This half-confession of schism and frank avowal of lack of discipline
on the part of a perfectly representative official of the Anglican
Church was something singularly Providential, for it came within a
fortnight after Isaac Hecker's first interview with Bishop Hughes,
described in the diary under date of March 22. That powerful man and
great prelate was a type of the best form of Catholicism at that day.
He was of the Church militant in more senses than one; and the
military qualities which have inspired the public action of Catholic
champions for the past three centuries were strongly developed in
him. That it was for the good of religion that it should have such
characters as John Hughes to care for its public welfare there is no
room to doubt. Since then the temper of Protestant Americans has
undergone a change which is almost radical. It has grown infinitely
more just and kindly towards Catholics. The decay of the Protestant
bond of cohesion from lapse of time and from the unsettlement of
belief in its chief doctrines; the fighting of two wars, one of them
the great Rebellion, which fused the populations of States and
acquainted men better with their neighbors; the coming in of millions
of Catholic foreigners whose every breath was an aspiration for
liberty; the rise, culmination, and collapse of the anti-Catholic
movement termed Know-nothing-ism; the polemical warfare of Bishop
Hughes himself and of his contemporaries--these and other causes have
made it possible, nay necessary, to treat non-Catholics in a
different spirit from what wisdom dictated fifty years ago.

If Dr. Seabury owned to schism and lack of discipline in An