"There's your grave mistake," I replied; "conviction is not faith. There are thousands of your countrymen filled with conviction of the truths of Catholicity; but they are as far outside the Church as a Confucian or a Buddhist. Faith is not a matter to be acquired by reading or knowledge. It is a gift, like the natural talent of a great painter or musician--a sixth sense, and the pure gratuity of the All-Wise and the All-Good." This appeared to him to be a revelation which he could not comprehend; it seemed to be such an inevitable logical sequence--conviction and profession. "I am attracted by everything," he said, "in your Church. The whole thing appears to be such a well-connected scheme, so unlike the religion in which I was born and educated, where you had to be forever searching after a missing link. And then your Church seems to be founded on love--love of a supernal kind, of course, and almost unintelligible; but it is the golden chain in the string of pearls. You will have noticed how rapidly sometimes the mind makes comparisons. Well, often, at our station over there, I have thought, as I searched the sea, that we Protestants look at God through the large end of a telescope and throw Him afar off, and make Him very small and insignificant; whilst you look at Him through the narrower end, and magnify Him and bring Him near. Our God--that is, the God in whom I was taught to believe--is the God of Sinai, and our Christ is the historic Christ; but that won't do for a humanity that is ever querulous for God, and you have found the secret." I was quite astonished at the solemn, thoughtful manner in which this young fellow spoke, and his words were so full of feeling and self-sympathy for his great privation. He was silent for a long time, smoking freely, whilst I was pondering many things, mostly in humility for our slow appreciation of the great gift of divine faith. At last, he said:-- "I do not quite follow you, sir, in your remark about a sixth sense; for this is not a question of sense, but of the soul." We were now getting into deep water, and when an old gentleman hasn't opened a book of philosophy for nearly thirty years, he may be well excused for a certain timidity in approaching these deep questions. But, "keep to the metaphorical" has always been a great rule of mine, which never failed me. "Let me explain," I said. "Have you ever been to an ophthalmic hospital or a blind asylum?" "Yes," he replied, "principally abroad."