sacrificed his blood and his life. He is the invisible Lord, the Head of his Church; he cannot acknowledge a Church community as his, and as the true Church, although it call him Lord, which, by its doctrines and rites, destroys the aim of his divine mission. The third in this party is, moreover, you yourself, because you will in a corrupt Church hardly become a true Christian, and acceptable to your Redeemer ; and even if by Divine Grace this were possible to you, it is still wrong constantly to expose yourself to the dangerous and seducing influence of such doctrines and rites, which may divert you from the path of a true Christian. You are morally bound to flee the temptation and to strengthen your better disposition; therefore, on your own account, it is your duty to renounce the corrupt church and to join the better communion. Finally, your fellow Christians constitute the fourth in this third party. By your adherence to a church which opposes the aim of Christianity you confirm others, who are not able to withstand its baneful influence, in a similar adherence, you contribute to the support of a pernicious institution, you trespass against the welfare of your brethren, you commit treason against true Christianity.

Henry. I agree with you most cordially, my dearest father. Oh, how your words tranquillize me! I hope to prove to you that the Roman Catholic alone is the true Church, and promotes the aim of Christianity, while the Protestant impedes it. This, at least, is my inmost conviction, founded on strong grounds, and when I have laid these before you, and you are obliged to acknowledge their force, Oh then, dearest father

Father, eyeing him stedfastly. I am to follow you, and also turn Catholic?

Henry was silent, he felt the force of the conclusion, but ventured not to answer in the affirmative, and only said that he in that case hoped to obtain his father's forgiveness.

But the father did not allow him to escape so easily; he, on the contrary, gave a turn to the subject, which made his son tremble. "If you," he solemnly added, "are an upright man and a Christian, you must, when we shall have proved to you that the Church of Rome contradicts the end of Christianity, abjure it, and again join ours. Do you assent to this?" Henry remained silent and embarrassed. "Give

me your hand," continued his father, "as a pledge of your assent, if I am to believe the sincerity of your Catholic profession, and am not to consider you as a hypocrite."

"

Henry summoned courage; he gave his hand: he was certain of his cause, he was a Catholic from conviction. Why should he hesitate?

"With this compact," interrupted his mother, "let us for to-day close the conversation upon this subject, and devote the rest of the evening to joy." Father and son willingly agreed to this: but the former only on that condition, that Henry should be prepared on the following evening, to produce the arguments of the Roman Catholics against the Protestant Church; but the first visits which Henry paid and received delayed the execution of this promise till the third evening.

It was Sunday, and his parents and Wilhelmina were preparing to go to Church; Henry did the same, at which his mother silently rejoiced; but not so his father, he certainly was silent, but his serious looks betrayed the agitation of his mind. At length, as they were setting out, and as Henry laid hold of his hat, his father asked him gravely, "Do you accom pany us? Do you go to our church?"

1

Henry. Yes! I hope you do not disapprove of it. Father, I am certainly surprised at it, Henry; you consider us in such gross errors that you have separated from us, and yet you will go to our Church, and knowingly do what you have renounced as wrong, And is it not directly contrary to the principles of your Church to enter an heretical place of worship? Is it not forbidden by the priests?

This prohibition," said Henry, hastily," does not concern me, for before my departure from Rome I received the Papal permission not only to attend Protestant Churches, but also to partake of the Lord's Supper with you, and to observe all the usages of your Church."

Silence!" exclaimed his father violently and severely, "Silence! Stay at home! You cannot enter our Church while you consider us as damned heretics, and our worship only as condemned heresy. No man can justify your becoming a hypocrite and an im postor, and only a villain will make use of such a permission."

IT

Henry stood confused and ashamed; he staid at home: his mother wept, and to his father the devo lime end of 219191 1 0 2011

tion of the day was lost. The truly painful examples of secret Roman Catholics, who by virtue of the Papal permission had played the part of Protestant Christians for years occurred to his memory; he thought of King Charles the Second of England, who had frequently given public assurances of his fidelity to the English Church, and yet, after his death, (in 1685) it was quite clear that he had been long a Roman Catholic. He remembered how the hereditary Prince Frederic Augustus of the Saxon Electorate, son of Augustus the Strong, had been secretly made, a Roman Catholic in Italy, and how he had received permission to conceal his conversion from the year 1712 to the year 1717, and how, with the same permission, Frederic, hereditary prince of Hessen Cassel, had kept his conversion secret from the year 1749 to the year 1754; he knew also how Duke Maurice William of Saxony, Administrator of the Protestant Diocese of Zeitz, having been converted by the Jesuit Schmeltzer, who had insinuated himself to him under the title of a Secretary of Legation, had, in the year 1715, privately become a Roman Catholic, even without the knowledge of his duchess, and remained so secretly till the year 1717, still continuing to administrate the diocese. How could he forget recent examples of this kind? Count Stolberg, who, in the year 1798, in a work entitled "The Address of a Holstein Churchwarden," stepped forth as an advo cate for Protestantism; and yet when he avowed himself a Roman Catholic, in the year 1800, he declared that he had entertained the same religious sentiments during the seven preceding years; or Stark, head preacher at the Court of Darmstadt, who discharged the duties of his office as a Protestant till his death, but had, during his life, published privately a defence of the Roman Catholic Church, and an attack upon the Protestants, under the title of" Theodul's Feast," and was interred in a Roman Catholic burying-ground.

relates that in the year 1820 he was privately received into the Catholic Church, at his country-seat, by a Roman Catholic bishop, but had obtained a dispensation to remain outwardly a Protestant, and a member of the council of his native town, which was pledged by oath to preserve the Protestant religion. This Mr. Von Haller also owned, in the letters just alluded to, (p. 13.) that the Duke Adolphus of Meklenberg Schwerin, who had also become a Roman Catholic, had assured him there were many secret Roman Catholics in Germany, who had obtained permission outwardly to conceal their creed. To find his Henry in the midst of such men, whose conduct he considered a mean hypocrisy, or a dishonourable weakness, was extremely painful to him, although it ought not to have come upon him unexpectedly, since he knew so many examples of the same kind. He was so agitated that he could not fix his attention during the service. When he, however, once during the sermon, raised his eyes, that had been gloomily cast on the ground, and directed them towards the minister, he saw Antonio standing under the pulpit, and listening to the discourse with the greatest attention. This gave his thoughts another direction. "Perhaps," thought he, "the seed of life is sown in the soul of this youth, which will bear good fruit," and he could not help thinking that it would perhaps have been better if he had allowed Henry to accompany them to Church. He remembered how he himself had accounted to his family for the conversion of so many Protestants in Rome, from the circumstance that they were obliged to be so long without spiritual nourishment in the metropolis of Roman Catholicism, and were thus induced to supply their religious wants in Roman Catholic Churches. It struck him that Wilhelmina had exculpated the conversion of her brother by maintaining that he would never have been unfaithful to his Church if he had remained in the bosom of his family, and within access to a Protestant Church. He felt so