in me.  Nothing that was open to criticism in the policy and tendency of the Church, either in the past or the present, made the slightest impression upon me.  If I could have believed that theology and the Bible were true, none of the doctrines which were afterwards embodied in the Syllabus and which were thereupon more or less promulgated, would have given me any trouble.  My reasons were entirely of a philological and critical order; not in the least of a metaphysical, political, or moral kind.  These orders of ideas seemed scarcely tangible or capable of being applied in any sense.  But the question as to whether there are contradictions between the Fourth Gospel and the synoptics is one which there can be no difficulty in grasping.  I can see these contradictions with such absolute clearness that I would stake my life, and, consequently, my eternal salvation, upon their reality without a moment’s hesitation.  In a question of this kind there can be none of those subterfuges which involve all moral and political opinions in so much doubt.  I do not admire either Philip II. or Pius V., but if I had no material reasons for disbelieving the Catholic creed, the atrocities of the former and the faggots of the latter would not be obstacles to my faith.

Many eminent minds have on various occasions hinted to me that I should never have broken away from Catholicism if I had not formed so narrow a view of it; or if, to put it in another way, my teachers had not given me this narrow view of it.  Some people hold St. Sulpice partially responsible for my incredulity, and reproach that establishment upon the one hand with having inspired me with too complete a trust in a scholasticism which implied an exaggerated rationalism, and, upon the other, with having required me to admit as necessary to salvation the suimmum of orthodoxy, thus inordinately increasing the amount of sustenance to be swallowed, while they narrowed in undue proportions the orifice through which it was to pass.  This is very unfair.  The directors of St. Sulpice, in representing Christianity in this light, and by being so open as to the measure of belief required, were simply acting like honest men.  They were not the persons who would have added the gratifying est de fide after a number of untenable propositions.  One of the worst kinds of intellectual dishonesty is to play upon words, to represent Christianity as imposing scarcely any sacrifice upon reason, and in this way to inveigle people into it without letting them know to what they have committed themselves.  This is where Catholic laymen, who dub themselves liberals, are under such a delusion.  Ignorant of theology and exegesis, they treat accession to Christianity as if it were a mere adhesion to a coterie.  They pick and choose, admitting one dogma and rejecting another, and then they are very indignant if any one tells them that they are not true Catholics.  No one who has studied theology can be guilty of such