This closes the correspondence of Mr. Baker with the dear and valued friend of his youth and manhood, previous to his reception into the Catholic Church; and I have postponed the continuation of my narrative in order to complete my extracts from it, and leave the writer to tell his own touching story to the end. Mr. Baker's conversion was the logical sequence of his former life, both intellectual and spiritual; it was the result of the accumulating light of the eleven preceding years, concentrated and brought to a focus upon the practical question of duty and obligation. The particular events which immediately preceded it, were like the stroke of the hammer on the mould of a bell, already completely cast and finished beneath it, and waiting only the shattering of its earthen shell to ring out with a clear and musical sound. "_The just man is the accuser of himself_," and Mr. Baker, whose deep humility made him unconscious of his own goodness, in the first vivid consciousness that the light which had led him to the Catholic Church was the light of grace, could no longer understand his past state of doubt, and reproached himself for it, as a sinful resistance to God. It is not necessary, however, to suppose that there was any thing grievously culpable in that state of doubt and hesitation. {107} He was right in attributing his final decision to the efficacious grace of the Holy Spirit. But this grace was only the last of a long series of graces which had prepared him to receive it. It did not change, but only perfected his habitual disposition of mind. It produced a crisis and a transformation in his soul, but it was one to which a long and gradual process had been continually tending. It was not a miracle, or a sudden revelation. Careful thought and reading, and the assiduous cultivation of his spiritual faculties had brought him to the apprehension of all the data of a rational judgment that the Catholic Church is true. The apparently sudden moment of deliberation and decision was but the successful effort of the mind and will to come into the certain consciousness of the truth already fairly proposed, and to determine to follow it. It was a supernatural grace which made this effort successful, and elevated the just conclusions of reason to the certitude of faith. But it was not a grace which superseded reason or dispensed with the reasonable grounds and evidences of an intellectual judgment and the motives of a just determination.