My old master was too wise a man to argue even with a woman and a boy. "What would the world think of such a step? What would your father say if he could come to life again? What will become of your education and future prospects?" My mother was alarmed at her own responsibility in the passive encouragement she had given. I was but seventeen years old. I did not, however, quite give up the point. "These people have a great deal to say for themselves."--"You think so? There's Christianity enough in the church of England." A few years later I found he thought there was too much. I had subsequent conversations with him: I indirectly consulted others: I still read my book; but a book of notes has not the effect of a dissertation, well followed up, and leading to a conclusion. I found some insurmountable difficulties, and for the rest I said, "Le roi s'avisera." I had no other catholic work, and no catholic adviser. I went back to my college, where other studies occupied me; yet I may say, I never lost sight of the subject. Gibbon, who was a gentleman-commoner of Magdalen College, a few years before my time, declared himself a catholic before his twentieth year. He was still remembered in college as a young man who seldom or never associated with other young men, who always dressed in black, and always came into the hall or refectory too late at dinner time. He found catholics to help him in the work of his conversion. His father put him _en pension_ with a Calvinist minister, to be re-made a protestant, no matter of what sort. He saw, and throughout his great work shows that he continued to see, that the truth of the Christian religion rests on the authority of the catholic church. "The predictions of the catholics are accomplished: the web of mystery has been unravelled by Arminians, Arians, and Socinians, whose numbers must be no longer counted from their separate congregations; and the pillars of revelation are shaken by men who profess the name without the substance of religion, who assume the licence without the temper of philosophy." Pity that such a man should have been led away by the spirit of the age, so as not to perceive that true philosophy is the good and natural ally of the catholic faith. If any grave doctor of the Anglican church had, at this time, attempted to lay the foundations of my belief in his own form of religion, he would probably have failed in his work; partly, because the respect due to such a personage from a youth like me would have hindered that freedom of question, reply, and rejoinder, by which satisfactory conviction is at length produced; partly, because I should have considered him as bound in honour and interest to maintain his own opinions, and require implicit submission; and because also I should probably have found, as I have since found, the arguments, which such an one would have adduced, to proceed on misrepresentation, and to be logically absurd.