such a one
information is brought that God has in some extraordinary way showed
Himself, he _will_ at first sight be tempted to believe it, and it is
only the experience of the number of deceits and false prophecies which
are in the world, his confidence in the Catholic Church which he sees
before him, and which is his guide into the truth, and (if he be
educated) his enlightened views concerning the course and laws of God's
providence, which keep him steady and make him hard to believe such
stories. On the other hand, men destitute of religion altogether, of
course from the first ridicule such accounts, and, as the event shows,
rightly; and yet, in spite of this, they are not so worthy our regard
as those who at first were credulous, from having some religious
principle without enough religious knowledge. Therefore, I am not
surprised that such sudden conversions as I have been describing
deceive for a time even the better sort of people--whom I should blame,
if I were called on to do so, not so much for the mere fact of their
believing readily, but for their not believing the Church; for
believing private individuals who have no authority more than the
Church, and for not recollecting St. Paul's words, "If any man . . .
though we, or an Angel from heaven, preach any other Gospel unto you
than that ye have received, let him be accursed[1]."

2. In the cases of sudden conversion I have been speaking of, when men
change at once either from open sin, or again from the zealous
partizanship of a certain creed, to some novel form of faith or
worship, their light-mindedness is detected by their frequent
changing--their changing again and again, so that one can never be
certain of them. This is the test of their unsoundness;--having no
root in themselves, their convictions and earnestness quickly wither
away. But there is another kind of sudden conversion, which I proceed
to mention, in which a man perseveres to the end, consistent in the new
form he adopts, and which may be right or wrong, as it happens, but
which _he_ cannot be said to recommend or confirm to us by his own
change. I mean when a man, for some reason or other, whether in
religion or not, takes a great disgust to his present course of life,
and suddenly abandons it for another. This is the case of those who
rush from one to the other extreme, and it generally arises from strong
and painful feeling, unsettling and, as it were, revolutionizing the
mind. A