“I sometimes regret that I was not born in a land where the bonds of orthodoxy are less tightly drawn than in Catholic countries.  For, at whatever cost, I am resolved to be a Christian; but I cannot be an orthodox Catholic.  When I find such independent and bold thinkers as Herder, Kant, and Fichte, calling themselves Christians, I should like to be so too.  But can I be so in the Catholic faith, which is like a bar of iron? and you cannot reason with a bar of iron.  Will not some one found amongst us a rational and critical Christianity?  I will confess to you that I believe that I have discovered in some German writers the true kind of Christianity which is adapted to us.  May I live to see this Christianity assuming a form capable of fully satisfying all the requirements of our age!  May I myself cooperate in the great work!  What so grieves me is the thought that perhaps it will be needful to be a priest in order to accomplish that; and I could not become a priest without being guilty of hypocrisy.

“Forgive me, sir, these thoughts, which must seem very reprehensible to you.  You are aware that all this has not as yet any dogmatic consistence in me; I still cling to the Church, my venerable mother; I recite the Psalms with heartfelt accents; I should, if I followed the bent of my inclination, pass hours at a time in church; gentle, plain, and pure piety touches me to the very heart; and I even have sharp relapses of devotional feeling.  All this cannot coexist without contradiction with my general condition.  But I have once for all made up my mind on the subject; I have cast off the inconvenient yoke of consistency, at all events for the time.  Will God condemn me for having simultaneously admitted that which my different faculties simultaneously exact, although I am unable to reconcile their contradictory demands?  Are there not periods in the history of the human mind when contradiction is necessary?  When the moral verities are under examination, doubt is unavoidable; and yet during this period of transition the pure and noble mind must still be moral, thanks to a contradiction.  Thus it is that I am at times both Catholic and Rationalist; but holy orders I can never take, for ’once a priest, always a priest.’

“In order to keep my letter within due limits, I must bring the long story of my inward struggles to a close.  I thank God, who has seen fit to put me through so severe a trial, for having brought me into contact with a mind such as yours, which is so well able to understand this trial, and to whom I can confide it without reserve.”

M——­ wrote me a very kind-hearted reply, offering a merely formal opposition to my project of following my own course of study.  My sister, whose high intelligence had for years been like the pillar of fire which lighted my path, wrote from Poland to encourage me in my resolution, which was finally taken at the end of September.  It was a very honest and straightforward act; and it is one which