“You doubtless feel a repugnance to joining the Church.  But we ought not to be ashamed of Christ; and the Church opens a sphere for you, and you especially.  You are not to dream your life away.  Your devotion must be regulated and directed by the discipline of the Church.  You know that there is a large Roman Catholic population in our country, especially in Wisconsin.  The bishop of that Territory is a German.  Now, here is your work—­to serve this German population.  And you can do it without feeling yourself among foreigners.  Here is the cross you are to take up.  Your cross is to resist this tendency to mysticism, to sentimental luxury, which is really enfeebling your soul and preventing you from attaining to true spiritual blessedness.

“I think you would better give up Greek, but command yourself sufficiently to master the Latin; that you need, and cannot do without.  Get the Latin, and with that and the English, French, and German which you already know, you can get along very well.  But don’t be discouraged.

“I want you to come and see our good bishop.  He is an excellent man—­learned, polite, easy, affable, affectionate, and exceedingly warm-hearted.  I spent two hours with him immediately after parting with you in Washington Street, and a couple of hours yesterday.  I like him very much.

“I have made up my mind, and I shall enter the Church if she will receive me.  There is no use in resisting.  You cannot be an Anglican, you must be a Catholic or a mystic.  If you enter the Church at all, it must be the Catholic.  There is nothing else.  So let me beg you, my dear Isaac, to begin by owning the Church and receiving her blessing.

“My health is very good, the family are all very well; I hope you are well.  Let me hear from you often.  Forgive me if I have said anything harsh or unkind in this letter, for all is meant in kindness, and be assured of my sincere and earnest affection.

“Yours truly,

“O.  A. BROWNSON.”

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CHAPTER XV

AT THE DOOR OF THE CHURCH

THE first effect of Brownson’s letter was to throw its recipient into a state of great though brief perplexity.  That final struggle, strange and painful, in which the soul for the last time contends against its happiness; in which it is drawn by an invincible attraction, knowing that it will yield yet striving still to resist; is one that must remain but half-comprehended by most of those to whom Catholic truth is an inheritance.  And yet there is an explanation which Father Hecker himself would possibly have given.  “Do you know what God is?” he said to the present writer in 1882, in that abrupt fashion with which he often put the deepest questions.  “That is not what I mean,” he went on, after getting a conventional reply:  “I’ll tell you what God is. He is the eternal Lover of the soul." That shudder of blind aversion which is