on
American love for and understanding of true liberty, but he doubtless
owed more than he thought at the time to the insignificance and
scanty numbers of his flock. There came a period, even in the career
of his immediate successor, when liberty itself seemed but a feeble
sapling which a strong wind of stupid bigotry might avail to root out
and cast away; while the chronicle of Bishop Fitzpatrick's episcopate
contains the record of convents invaded under forms of law, and of
both convents and churches sacked and burned by "Native American"
mobs, who were secure of their immunity from punishment. Such
outrages, witnessed by the second and third Bishops of Boston, and
the incessant conflict to which they were compelled with the bigotry
which caused them and which protected their perpetrators, predisposed
both them and their clergy to a distrustful attitude toward converts
like Brownson and Hecker, in whom American traits of character were
very conspicuous. Dr. Brownson has recorded in _The Convert,_ p. 374,
the fact that his entrance into the Church was delayed for months by
his fear of explaining to Bishop Fitzpatrick the precise road by
which he had approached it. He says:

"I really thought that I had made some philosophical discoveries
which would be of value even to Catholic theologians in convincing
and converting unbelievers, and I dreaded to have them rejected by
the Catholic bishop. But I perceived almost instantly that he either
was ignorant of my doctrine of life or placed no confidence in it;
and I felt that he was far more likely, bred as he had been in a
different philosophical school from myself, to oppose than to accept.
I had, indeed, however highly I esteemed the doctrine, no special
attachment to it for its own sake, and could, so far as it was
concerned, give it up at a word without a single regret; but, if I
rejected or waived it, what reason had I for regarding the Church as
authoritative for natural reason, or for recognizing any authority in
the bishop himself to teach me? Here was the difficulty. . . . My
trouble was great, and the bishop could not relieve me, for I dared
not disclose to him its source."

The reader will understand that we do not compare the course of
Bishop Fitzpatrick in Brownson's case with that taken by him toward
Isaac Hecker. The latter was a young man, unknown to the bishop save
by what he may have said of his own antecedents, while Brownson was a
well-known publicist,