ountry, especially in Wisconsin. The bishop of that Territory is
a German. Now, here is your work--to serve this German population.
And you can do it without feeling yourself among foreigners. Here is
the cross you are to take up. Your cross is to resist this tendency
to mysticism, to sentimental luxury, which is really enfeebling your
soul and preventing you from attaining to true spiritual blessedness.

"I think you would better give up Greek, but command yourself
sufficiently to master the Latin; that you need, and cannot do
without. Get the Latin, and with that and the English, French, and
German which you already know, you can get along very well. But don't
be discouraged.

"I want you to come and see our good bishop. He is an excellent
man--learned, polite, easy, affable, affectionate, and exceedingly
warm-hearted. I spent two hours with him immediately after parting
with you in Washington Street, and a couple of hours yesterday. I
like him very much.

"I have made up my mind, and I shall enter the Church if she will
receive me. There is no use in resisting. You cannot be an Anglican,
you must be a Catholic or a mystic. If you enter the Church at all,
it must be the Catholic. There is nothing else. So let me beg you, my
dear Isaac, to begin by owning the Church and receiving her blessing.

"My health is very good, the family are all very well; I hope you are
well. Let me hear from you often. Forgive me if I have said anything
harsh or unkind in this letter, for all is meant in kindness, and be
assured of my sincere and earnest affection.

"Yours truly,

"O. A. BROWNSON."

________________________

CHAPTER XV

AT THE DOOR OF THE CHURCH

THE first effect of Brownson's letter was to throw its recipient into
a state of great though brief perplexity. That final struggle,
strange and painful, in which the soul for the last time contends
against its happiness; in which it is drawn by an invincible
attraction, knowing that it will yield yet striving still to resist;
is one that must remain but half-comprehended by most of those to
whom Catholic truth is an inheritance. And yet there is an
explanation which Father Hecker himself would possibly have given.
"Do you know what God is?" he said to the present writer in 1882, in
that abrupt fashion with which he often put the deepest questions.
"That is not what I mean," he went on, after getting a conventional
reply: "I'll tell you what God is. _He is the et