"My Dear Sir,--I received your kind invitation to Garendon on Saturday; but I thought it best to postpone answering it for a day or two, that I might consider what I had better do. If the visit which you propose to me had been an ordinary one, I suppose I should have declined it for the present, as I believe my father and mother will be at Althorp till about the 25th January, and I seldom go out when they are here. But as you invite me in the hope, and with a desire, that good may be done by my going, I believe I should be sorry afterwards if I refused. I therefore have told my father of my intention, and, if nothing happens to prevent me, I will be with you on Monday the 25th. As to the hour of my arrival, I cannot just now tell how the coaches run between Northampton and Loughborough; but I conclude I shall be with you in good time. And now that I have determined to go, I am really thankful that another opportunity of conversing with you is given me so soon; and I trust that our intercourse will be blessed for our own good and that of others. And if the step you have taken in becoming a Roman Catholic is correct, according to the will of Christ, I have no doubt that my conversation with you will be of use in drawing me nearer to the right point. If, as I still am convinced, there is some error in your views, let us agree in hoping that our intercourse may be likewise profitable to you. I have been confirmed, by every conversation which I have had with Roman Catholics, in the persuasion that there is something materially wrong in what we may call the Protestant system; and I have spoken my mind to this effect as often as occasion has been given me. But if our union with the Roman Catholic Church involves a declaration of my belief of all that she teaches, and a submission to all her authority, as their subjects are set forth in Bossuet's Exposition and Catechism, I am not as yet one of the body; and I am reduced to the conviction that somewhere or other there is an error among {191} you. One thing I have learnt in the course of these inquiries is that the Scriptures of the New Testament are not, as I formerly used to regard them through want of consideration, the formal canon of the Christian faith. It is as clear to me as I suppose you could wish it to be, that the oral tradition of Christ to Peter and the other Apostles, and that of the Apostles to the Churches, is the rule of Christian doctrine, and with all my heart I seek for the knowledge of what they taught, and have been frequently struck with the desirableness of a clear and definite authority to which we might refer, when I have observed the mischief into which Christians have fallen by following each his own judgment. I do not see how I should be stopped from at once becoming Catholic, under this impression, if it was not that on comparing the state of the doctrine and discipline