to do while he is
choking and drowning. . . . Thank Heaven, the storm has stranded me
upon the everlasting Rock of Peter;--but it has been a sore trouble
to reach it. Protestants, who look at creeds as things to be
changed like coats, whenever they seem not to fit them, little know
what we Catholic-hearted ones suffer. . . . If they did, they would
be more merciful and more chary in the requirements of us, just as
we are in the very throe of a new-born existence. The excellent
man, to whose care I have committed myself, has a wise and a tender
heart . . . he saw no harm in my concealing from my father the
spiritual reason of my giving up my curacy (for I have given it up),
and only giving the outward, but equally true reason, that I found
it on the whole an ineligible and distressing post. . . . I know
you will apply to such an act that disgusting monosyllable of which
Protestants are so fond. He felt with me and for me--for my horror
of giving pain to my father, and for my wearied and excited state of
mind; and strangely enough--to show how differently, according to
the difference of the organs, the same object may appear to two
people--he quoted in my favour that very verse which you wrest
against me. He wished me to show my father that I had only changed
my heaven, and not my character, by becoming an Ultramontane-
Catholic . . . that, as far as his esteem and affection were founded
on anything in me, the ground of it did not vanish with my
conversion. If I had told him at once of my altered opinions, he
would have henceforth viewed every word and action with a perjudiced
eye. . . . Protestants are so bigoted . . . but if, after seeing me
for a month or two the same Luke that he had ever known me, he were
gradually informed that I had all the while held that creed which he
had considered incompatible with such a life as I hope mine would
be--you must see the effect which it ought to have. . . . I don't
doubt that you will complain of all this. . . . All I can say is,
that I cannot sympathise with that superstitious reverence for mere
verbal truth, which is so common among Protestants. . . . It seems
to me they throw away the spirit of truth, in their idolatry of its
letter. For instance,--what is the use of informing a man of a true
fact but to induce a true opinion in him? But if, by clinging to
the exact letter of the fact, you create a false opinion in his
mind, as I