Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/242

252 still to wait, still to reflect, before she gave in her adhesion to the Catholic faith. It was too late. She had already done so, but with the utmost quietness. Monsignor L—— had admitted her into the Papal church. She had now written on the subject to her husband and to her mother, and she knew that so doing she should cause them great sorrow. Nevertheless, she felt herself supremely happy in the new world which she had entered; she seemed to herself as if borne on the wings of angels. I listened to her with astonishment, and with deep sympathy. There was in this soul so much humility, such a pure impulse, such good-will in seeking only for God and his truth, that it was impossible for me to doubt of her conversion being in some measure the work of the Eternal Truth, for which she sought, and which she now merely saw too exclusively in one certain form. But the language of polemics died upon my lips.

“You will teach the proud Protestants,” I said to her, “how much truth and beauty exists in the Catholic faith; and God will teach you to see this eternal truth in the belief and church of your fathers,—the church of the Pilgrim-fathers, upon the foundation of which the New World built, and still builds, its power. In the love of Christ, the two churches are one. True Christians, in both of them, will teach them the better to understand each other.”

Such were my parting words to the amiable American lady, whom I never felt nearer to me than at the moment when we, in our ecclesiastical faith, were separated forever.

This meeting, however, together with the renewed