principle of faith and obedience into a more perfect and complete actuation. Stephen had _fides formata_ before he was baptized, and so have converts of the kind we are describing, _fides formata_, that is faith which worketh by love, before their external union to the body of the Catholic church is consummated. The change which takes place in a convert of this kind, is not a transfer of mental allegiance from the word of God to the arbitrary, irresponsible dictation of a hierarchy. It is simply an increased intelligence of the actual contents of the word of God, and of the nature of the medium through which the knowledge of that word is transmitted. The object of faith, upon which the intellectual act of believing terminates, is the revealed truth considered as revealed, or as credible on the veracity of God. The medium or instrument is the testimony by which we are authentically informed of the fact of revelation and of its contents. In the case supposed, the person has received from the testimony of the Church, which reaches him through the Christian tradition, the knowledge of the principal facts and mysteries revealed by Jesus Christ. Having, therefore, a reasonable motive for believing, and the aid of divine grace, he was able, when he attained the use of reason, to elicit explicit acts of faith in the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other doctrines sufficiently proposed to him, to exercise continually the habit of faith, and to persevere in the same without any lapse. In this explicit faith, or faith in actual exercise, was contained an implicit faith in all that God has revealed, but which was not known to the subject in an explicit manner. When he examined into that testimony through which the doctrine of Christ had been proposed to him, he found that his undoubting belief in that testimony contained all implicit recognition of the infallibility of the witness, and that he must either draw the logical conclusion, or renounce the premises. He also found that the article of the creed, "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church," as revealed in the Scripture, and explained by the living, concrete sense of the primitive Christians, contains in itself the idea of infallibility. Convinced, therefore, that the Catholic Church, together with her testimony and instruction respecting the person of the incarnate God and Saviour, testifies and teaches her own infallibility as a witness, teacher, and judge of controversies, and that this doctrine is contained in the word of God, he perceives that he must believe on the veracity of God all that the church proposes to him as contained in the material object of faith, the _objectum materiale quod_ of theologians. {110} When he is further convinced that the bishop who occupies the See of Peter, together with his colleagues, constitutes the _ecclesia docens_, the teaching church, and that the infallible church has, therefore, proclaimed her doctrine in the decrees of the Council of Trent; of course, nothing