CHAPTER I. His First Days In The Church. Conversions to Catholicism were not such every-day occurrences, some thirty years ago, as they are now. The disabilities under which Catholics laboured politically, before 1829, made them hide their heads, except when forced into public notice by efforts to break their shackles. The religion that civilized England, and consecrated every remarkable spot in it to the service of God, had become a thing of the past, and the relics of Catholic piety that studded the land were looked upon as the gravestones of its corse, or the trophies of vanquishing Protestantism. Not only was Catholicity supposed to be dead in England, but its memory was in execration; nurses frightened the children with phantoms of monks, and mountebank preachers took their inspiration from the prejudices they had imbibed in childhood. The agitation about the _Veto_, and the Debates on the Catholic question, which filled the public mind about the year 1830, and for some ten years before, showed that Catholicity had not died, but only slept. The Catholics emerged from their dens and caverns; they bought and sold, spoke and listened, like their neighbours; and the King was not afraid of a Catholic ball when he took his next airing {200} in Hyde Park. The Catholic Church had been barely given leave to eke out its declining days, with something like the indulgence allowed a condemned criminal, when, to the astonishment of all, it sprung up with new vigour, and waxed and throve in numbers and in position. It was considered worth a hearing now, and faith came by hearing to many, who would have been horrified before at opening by chance such an antichristian thing as a Catholic book. A conversion, then, rather stunned than embittered the relatives of the convert. The full tide of Tractarianism had not yet set in, and the systematic pitchforks of private persecution and stately rebuke, that were afterwards invented to stop it, were not so much as thought of. The conversion of the Honourable George Spencer happened in those peculiar times. His family were partially prepared for it, for fluctuating between so many religious opinions as he had been for so long, and earnest, too, in pushing arguments to their furthest length, it was often half suspected that he would go to Popery at last. There he was now, a child of the Catholic Church, shrived and baptized according to her ritual. His die was cast. He was fixed for ever. His wandering was at an end. With the exception of his house-keeper, who laid her down to die for sheer affliction at the news, we are not aware that many others were much moved by what they considered his defection. Doubtless, his father and the immediate family circle felt it deeply; his Protestant vagaries had caused them sleepless nights and silent afternoons, and the Church of which he became a member was not likely to seem less absurd to them than it once seemed to himself. But then