“Not long after this an important event happened in the cloister.  In the absence of the deacon of the Abbey, I was to preach the Thanksgiving sermon of Harvest-home.  During the week the Prince-Abbot Berthold gave up the ghost; and my sermon became at once a Thanks-giving and Funeral Sermon.  Perhaps it may not be unworthy of notice, that I was thus called to pronounce the burial discourse over the body of the last reigning, spiritual Prince Abbot in Germany.  He was a man of God, and worthy of this honor.

“One year after this event, I was appointed Professor of Biblical Hermeneutics in Klagenfurt, and left the Abbey forever.  In Klagenfurt I remained ten years, dwelling in the same house, and eating at the same table, with seventeen other professors.  Their conversation naturally suggestednew topics of study, and brought to my notice books, which I had never before seen.  One day I heard at table, that Maurus Cappellari, a monk of Camaldoli, had been elected Pope, under the name of Gregory Sixteenth.  He was spoken of as a very learned man, who had written many books.  At this time I was a firm believer in the Pope’s infallibility; and when I heard these books mentioned, there arose in me an irresistible longing to read them.  I inquired for them; but they were nowhere to be had.  At length I heard, that his most important work, The Triumph of the Holy See, and of the Church, had been translated into German and published in Augsburg.  Ere long the precious volume was in my hands.  I began to read it with the profoundest awe.  The farther I read, the more my wonder grew.  The subject was of the deepest interest to me.  I could not lay the book out of my hand, till I had read it through with the closest attention.  Now at length my eyes were opened.  I saw before me a monk, who had been educated in an Italian cloister; who, indeed, had read much, and yet only what was calculated to strengthen him in the prejudices of his childhood; and who had entirely neglected those studies upon which a bishop should most rely, in order to work out the salvation of man.  I perceived at the same time, that this was the strongest instrument for battering down the walls, which separate Christian from Christian.  I saw, though as yet dimly, the way in which the union of Christians in the one true church was to be accomplished.  I knew not whether to be most astonished at my own blindness, that, in all my previous studies, I had not perceived, what the reading of this single book made manifest to me; or at the blindness of the Pope, who had undertaken to justify such follies, without perceiving that at the same moment he was himself lying in fatal error.  But since I have learned more thoroughly the ways of the Lord, I am now no more astonished at this, but pray only to Divine providence, who so mysteriously prepares all people to be united in one true church.  I no longer believed in the Pope’s infallibility; nay, I believed even, that, to the great injury of humanity, he lay in fatal error.  I felt, moreover, that now the time had fully come, when I should publicly show myself, and found in America a parish and a school, and become the spiritual guide of men, and the schoolmaster of children.