been if he had known as much more of Catholic truth as we know now, and had lived among even such an increase of privileges as we enjoy. If sanctity, asceticism, and fervour such as his were possible then, are they not so now for us, with light, and help, and instruction which were not supplied to him? If the gift of miracles then bore testimony to the unrecalled promise given to them that believe, what but our miserable self-indulgence and want of faith cuts us off from its daily manifestation? Have we not all that made him what he was, and much more that he would have rejoiced to see? Let him not be our condemnation hereafter if we think to plead our degenerate days and defective teaching in excuse for our want of devotion and our unmortified lives. There is a danger now lest we learn to admire asceticism without practising it, and to imagine that weak health excuses us from all severe self-discipline. We shall never roll away the reproach that hangs over us as a Church, and as a nation, while it is so. Others, weaker than we, with more excuses than we, have chosen the steeper road for the sake of their Master's company, and have found themselves, even in this life, more than abundantly repaid. And so the Vicar of Madeley-with the whole weight of his dull self-indulgent generation against him, and no director but the still small voice which we so easily and often disregard-so he learned Christ. His memory should comfort us when we hear our Mother despised among the Churches as a barren Spouse, and his example should cheer us when we feel as if our loneliness and infrequent communions delay our union with our Lord. Union with Him in love and suffering is always attainable, though sacramental union may be withheld. Suffering that does not promote love is but a dreary bondage, and has often proved a curse to the soul. Love without suffering is the joy reserved for the blessed ones at rest. Love that thirsts for suffering, and suffering that intensifies love, in one unbroken, golden circle, constitute the Church's bridal ring; and in one form or other, He Who first wrought it on Calvary presents it as the pledge of union to every faithful soul.

ART. XVII.-EXPERIENCES OF A 'VERT.

(COMMUNICATED.)

I BELONG to that strange category about whose prepositional affix opinions are divided in England. Old friends call me a pervert new acquaintances a convert: the other day I was addressed as a 'vert. It took my fancy as offending nobody, if pleasing nobody; and I shall have no objection if I should hear it ever interpreted "greenhorn." To be a greenhorn, if it be for the sake of Christ, is no reproach. When I look into history, however, I find that the terms "convert" and "pervert" were bandied about in the reigns of Charles II. and James II. quite as much as they ever have been of late; so that my position is by no means a new one : there were plenty of converts or perverts to tell their experiences then as now; and from reading some of them I have doubtless enlarged my own. But this term "vert" I have every reason to believe has been only just coined. Is it a mere effect of modern refinement and delicacy, or does it indicate some new phase of feeling into which we are about to enter? But I must not allow myself to be led into abstract questions.

Reverting to facts, it will seem to have been my fate to have been twice duped in the course of my life upon a point affecting my highest interests. I do not say so myself-God forbid-but there is something in it that it is beyond me to explain to my own satisfaction. The Church of England professed to make me a member of the Holy Catholic Church in baptising me; but I was told in after life to consider and call myself a member of the Church of England: the Church of Rome in after life professed to receive me into the Holy Catholic Church, but, on my reception, it was to the Roman Catholic Church that I was inade to promise obedience. Somehow or other, they all tell you, that by joining their communion you will become a member of the Catholic Church; but when you have joined it, you find you must call yourself by some other epithet in addition, or people won't understand you. There must be some reason for this, or else, when you called yourself a "Catholic," people would have no doubt about your belongings. Of course I do not mean to say that if you were in a room full of Roman Catholics, and you called yourself a "Catholic," they would not all know well enough what you meant; but in general society you would certainly have some slight chance of being considered an Irvingite and if

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you were amongst Anglicans, they would not allow for a moment that you had described yourself accurately, being a "Roman Catholic," a term which, beyond all doubt, nobody that is in communion with the Church of Rome can repudiate.

I noted all this down when I was received, and have verified it since in fact. I have stayed in many parts of Great Britain, where there were many churches dedicated to Christ or some saint or apostle of His, but not one where I, being a Roman Catholic, could worship without offence. It has been the same case in some parts of Switzerland and Germany, and still more in some parts of the East. I have vastly more church accommodation, so to speak, on the whole since I joined the Church of Rome, than when I was a member of the Church of England. One undoubtedly carries you further than the other, but it will not take you everywhere: there are places where Christ is worshipped, and where no Roman Catholic church or chapel has been, or is likely to be, for years, perhaps for centuries.

It would be mere affectation to pretend surprise at what I must have been prepared for in some sense beforehand; but each time that I have stayed at home within sight of a Christian Church opened for worship, or else within hearing of church bells, or else seen Greeks and Armenians at their respective services, without feeling at liberty to join in them, I have been set thinking, and felt that the terms Anglo-Catholic, Roman Catholic, and the like, bespoke facts as well as principles. It may be shallowness, it may be weakness, but so strongly am I the creature of circumstances, that had I never gone out of England, I might never have turned Roman Catholic. At all events I never felt any misgivings about my position in the Church of England till I had become familiar with continental churches; and it was not till I had become a Roman Catholic that I discovered by experience that there were limits, even in countries where Christ was worshipped, to what Dean Milman calls Latin Christianity.

Was it merely that I might find a church in every port that I turned Roman Catholic? By no means: humanly speaking, I was swayed by a number of mixed motives; perhaps none of them very logical taken apart, or even irresistible viewed as a whole. Many of them indeed had been in my mind for years, without having had the slightest effect upon me till then. I had looked the Gorham judgment in the face, and felt no qualms of any kind: I had studied the Royal Supremacy question, and not felt the force of the arguments which had been urged against the Church of England on that

score on the doctrine of the Real Presence I conceived that if the teaching of the Church of England fell short of it, that of the Church of Rome went beyond it. I will go a step further and say, that would the laws of both churches have permitted me to have presented myself for communion in the churches of Rome abroad, and the churches of England at home, I do not believe that even my intercourse with the Continent would have had the effect of making me turn Roman Catholic. In fact, I frequently deliberated whether I should not take advantage of that custom which, curiously enough, actually prevails in both churches, of administering communion to all who present themselves for it without asking any questions. But here some college statutes, to which I was bound, intervened; nor indeed did it recommend itself as a straightforward course. Then, too, the difficulty of communicating in one kind was to be got over. Accordingly I was brought face to face with the question whether all those gorgeous churches which I saw on the Continent were or were not true churches-whether all those that thronged to them were in error and I right, or the reverse. Such a question had never occurred to me before, when I met Dissenters going to their chapels at home in my way to the parish church. Now, it was I who was palpably in the minority, and as one to thousands.

By degrees I became acquainted with some of those men, women, and children, rich and poor, who worshipped in those churches. I found them at least as good Christians as myself: very much the class of persons that I was accustomed to in England. I could see no great difference between their Christianity and ours out of church; and, with the exception that they made Sunday more of a day of amusement than we did, it seemed to me that I never should have suspected from anything that I noticed in their society, that our creeds were not the same. By degrees I was led to visit their convents and ecclesiastical establishments, and the result was that I was deeply impressed with our own shortcomings, and their manifest superiority over us in all these respects.

At length I began to go to some of their services on week days, on the occasion generally of some festival, for which there had been no service given out in our Ambassador's chapel. At first I found it intolerably difficult to discover the places, even after I had provided myself with a book. It offended me greatly to see the majority so taken up with their private devotions, and so apparently indifferent to all that was going on; and it frequently happened that I came away in disgust,

partly from not being able to join in the service myself, and partly from seeing so few of the congregation attempting to join in it from first to last. However, insensibly it all grew upon me that is, I found out that people were really following the services, though by means of meditations and devotions of their own; and I became alive to the extreme beauty of the services themselves, as I learned them by heart, and could connect them in all their stages with the ceremonial.

I now went regularly to their churches, when there was no service in our own; and between the two imagined that I had got all I wanted, or could desire. I had no sort of misgivings about my position; and when I came back to England, between College Chapel twice a day, University sermons on Sundays and festivals, early communions occasionally in some well-ordered parish church, I did not even miss the loss of the Continental churches, though, the moment I came abroad again, I went back to them at once as old friends. In this way I passed several years pleasantly enough—not indeed without causing anxiety to some of my fond relatives, but wondering in my own heart what it could possibly have been that had taken so many of my contemporaries over. had studied every text of Scripture usually adduced by controversialists on both sides; I had studied biblical commentators of all schools; I had plodded through ecclesiastical history more than once, dwelling on those facts which bore most upon the points at issue between England and Rome; and I was more than ever convinced that the position of the former was a solid one. If perchance I got into an argument with any one, lay or clerical, on the other side, it always seemed to me that I came off victorious, and strengthened in my own belief; and though I knew that some of my Roman Catholic friends had been praying for what they were pleased to term my "conversion" for years, it never entered into my head for a moment that any new light could dawn upon me through what had proved so long imperative; though when first they had comnienced doing so to my knowledge, I must own to having felt a little nervous about the issue.

At length, when I least expected it myself, and was greatly pre-occupied by other cares, when my friends in despair, as they told me afterwards, had almost ceased praying for me, there rose up within me irrepressibly and most intelligibly a voice which said "Go!" It would not be put down, argued, nor trifled with it assumed the authority of conscience, and bade me disobey it at my peril. It was useless to plead that I had still my difficulties that I could not get over my ob