Confessions of a Convert - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ... VIII And now I do not know whether it is respectful to my holy mother the Church to attempt to say what she has been to me ever since the day that I walked blind and dumb and miserable into her arms. But I have said so much of others that I will venture even this. She, too, needs no charity of mine, for she is the fount and river of it. § 1. It seems very remarkable to be obliged to say that the idea of returning to the Church of England is as inconceivable as the idea of seeking to enter the Choctaw fold. Yet, humanly speaking, and looking at it from the Anglican side, so far as that is possible, I quite understand why it is that Anglicans are always accustomed to say of every convert that "he is certain to come back." First of all, they naturally desire that all persons, however obscure, who are not likely to disgrace themselves, should be under the same allegiance as that to which they pay their own homage. Why, Catholics have a similar wish on their side! Secondly, in a word, they do not understand the situation. They are so accustomed to division and disunion on the deepest matters of faith in their own body, that they can scarcely conceive its being otherwise elsewhere. Either, they say, these divisions must be in Catholicism too, though beneath the surface, or, if they are not, it must mean that intellectual activity is suppressed by the "iron uniformity" of the system. They do not at all understand how "the truth can make (us) free." It is a complete begging of the question, I allow, but it appears to me more true every day that I live, that those few persons who do return do so either by the road of complete unbelief, or through some grave sin in their lives, or through a species of insanity, or through the fact that they...