“It was always difficult to detect how much of conviction and how much of banter there was in his treatment of men engaged in the actual intellectual movement of our times.  I found such to be the case in my own intercourse with him.  He always attacked me in a bantering way, but, I thought, half in earnest too.  Hence I never found it advisable to enter into argument with him.  How can you argue with a man, a brilliant wit and an accomplished theologian, who continually flashes back and forth between first principles and witticisms?  When I would undertake to grapple with him on first principles he would throw me off with a joke, and while I was parrying the joke he was back again upon first principles.

“An illustration of his way of treating men and questions was his reception of me when I presented myself to him, some months before Dr. Brownson did, for reception into the Church.  ’What truths were the stepping-stones that led you here?’ he would have asked if he had had the temperament of the apostle.  But instead of searching for truth in me he began to search for error.  I had lived with the Brook Farm Community and with the Fruitlands Community, and before that had been a member of a Workingman’s party in New York City, in all which organizations the right of private ownership of property had been a prime question. . . .  But, as for my part, at the time Bishop Fitzpatrick wanted me to purge myself of communism, I had settled the question in my own mind, and on principles which I afterwards found to be Catholic.  The study and settlement of the question of ownership was one of the things that led me into the Church, and I am not a little surprised that what was a door to lead me into the Church seems at this day to be a door to lead some others out.  But when the bishop attacked me about it, it was no longer with me an actual question.  I had settled the question of private ownership in harmony with Catholic principles, or I should not have dared to present myself as a convert.  But I mention this because it illustrates Bishop Fitzpatrick’s character.

“His was, indeed, a first-class mind both in natural gifts and acquired cultivation, but his habitual bearing was that of suspicion of error; as man and prelate he had a joyful readiness to search it out and correct it from his own point of view.  He was a type of mind common then and not uncommon now—­the embodiment of a purpose to refute error, and to refute it by condemnation direct, authoritative even if argumentative:  the other type of mind would seek for truth amidst the error, establish its existence, applaud it, and endeavor to make it a basis for further truth and a fulcrum for the overthrow of the error connected with it.