alarmed her conscience, and
she appealed to her spiritual director, the Abbe Premord, for advice,
fearing lest her faith might be endangered if she read more. He
encouraged her to persevere, telling her in no wise to deny herself
these intellectual enjoyments. But her rigid Catholicism was doomed from
that hour. Hers was that order of mind which can never give ostensible
adhesion to a creed whilst morally unconvinced; never accept that refuge
of the weak from the torment of doubt, in abdicating the functions of
reason and conscience, shifting the onus of responsibility on to others,
and agreeing to believe, as it were, by proxy. She had plunged
fearlessly and headlong into Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Mably,
Leibnitz, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, Montesquieu; beginning to call
many things in question, and, through the darkness and confusion into
which she was sometimes thrown, trying honestly and sincerely to feel
her way to some more glorious faith and light.

In the convent she had been familiarized with Romanism under its most
attractive aspects. The moral refinement, the mystery, the seclusion,
and picturesque beauties of that abode had a poetic charm that had
carried her irresistibly away. But, confronted with the system in its
practical working, she was staggered by many of its features. In the
country churches around her she saw the peasantry encouraged in their
grossest superstitions, and the ritual, carelessly hurried through,
degenerate often into mere mockery. The practice of confession,
moreover--her ultimate condemnation of which, as an institution whose
results for good are scanty, its dangers excessive, will be endorsed by
most persons in this country--and the Church's denial of the right of
salvation to all outside its pale, revolted her; and she caught at the
teaching of those who claimed liberty of conscience. "Reading Leibnitz,"
she observes, "I became a Protestant without knowing it." That purer and
more liberal Christianity she dreamed of had, she discovered, been the
ideal of many great men. The step brought her face to face with fresh
and grave problems of which, she truly observes, the solutions were
beyond her years, and beyond that era. There came to her rare moments of
celestial calm and concord, but she owed them to other and indirect
sources of inspiration. The study of philosophy, indeed, was not much
more congenial to her at sixteen than arithmetic had been at six. In
what merely exe