It is plain that Stephen must have acknowledged St. Peter as the accredited representative of Jesus Christ, through whom he received the doctrine he was to believe, and the precepts he was to obey, as a Christian. The New Testament was yet unwritten, and the divine word could only be learned from the lips or the apostles. Stephen could not, therefore, submit his mind and will to Jesus Christ, except by submitting to their authority. Now, if this authority has really been transmitted to the successors of St. Peter, and to their colleagues in the episcopate, it is plain that it is by submission to this authority that we are to submit the mind and will to Jesus Christ, who has delegated it to them. "He that heareth you heareth me;" "As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you," Therefore, when a person who has not hitherto formally and explicitly recognized and submitted to this authority, makes his submission to it, we call it a conversion, because it betokens a real interior change of the intellect and will; accompanied by an exterior change of ecclesiastical relations, if he has belonged to any other visible communion before, or, if not, by the assumption of these relations for the first time. This is without respect to his former subjective state of interior relation to Christ and the church. If he had a divine faith before, conversion does not include the passage from a state of unbelief to faith. If this faith was previously vivified by charity, it does not include the passage from a state of sin to the state or grace. {109} If, on the contrary, he was before an infidel, or a wilful heretic, and destitute of charity, conversion includes both these transitions. We do not limit the application of the word conversion to a mere interior and exterior submission to the authority of the church. We employ it also to designate conversion from sin, and continually preach to Catholics who are living in sin the necessity of being converted to a holy life. We apply the term also to a change from a tepid condition of the spiritual life to a habit of more fervent piety. It is used as a general term to denote any marked religious change for the better, and its specific meaning must be determined by the connection in which it is employed. Its indiscriminate use in denoting the act of transition from a Protestant communion to the Catholic church does not necessarily imply that no discrimination can be made among those who make this transition. Nor does it follow that all the language of the writer whom Dr. Bacon criticizes, can be fully verified in regard to all Catholic converts. Numbers of them have had from childhood a firm faith in the principal Christian mysteries, and an habitual determination of the will, at least for many years, to the love of God. In such instances, what is technically called "conversion," is like what we have supposed the conversion of Stephen to have been, the evolution of the