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Show NOTABLE CONVERTS What the Puritans Failed to Foresee An Extraordinary Conversion. . (Communicated.) The great intellectual struggle of sincere and honest souls in search of the true faith is sometices marvelous in its results. When Cardinal Xewman led the Oxford movement his sole object and aim in life were to restore order in the chaotic state of the Anglican church. Honest, sincere and powerful in intellect, he traveled to Rome to learn and convince himself thoroughly of the errors of the Catholic Church so that he might bring out. in bold contrast con-trast the beauties and grandeur of the Anglican Church and the necessity of the schism of Henry Villi. During his stay in Rome he studied Christian Chris-tian principles to their foundation. Doubts began to arise in his mind as to his hereulian undertaking, undertak-ing, viz., to connect the Anglican Church by some invisible chain with -primitive Christianity. The more and the deeper he studied the graver and more serious were the doubts which arose in his honest, sincere and logical mind. To him the Pope was no longer the anti-Christ whom he considered him to be when leaving old England. Returning home, pressed by doubts, whilst crossing the Mediterranean Medi-terranean Sea, he poured forth the cravings of his soul in that beautiful hymn. "Lead. Kindly Light." After reaching England, the darkness grew denser, and through the mist he could see no light which would enable his powerful intellect to trace the invisible chain from the foundation of the Anglican An-glican Church of Henry VIII back to primitive Christianity. The missing links were visible in the Church of Rome. He told his brother Francis of his mental struggles, his doubts, etc. His brother honestly and candidly told him that in his state of mind nothing rewiUined for him to do- but "to go back to Rome." He took the step which shook the faith of thousands of Anglicans. Such cases are not. rare. They speak volumes. A short time ago in Bridgcwater, Mass., a notable convert, the son of Harriet Beecher Stowe. and a nephew of Henry Ward Beecher. one of America's greatest preachers, created a similar sensation. Rev. Charles E. Stowe, a minister of high standing in the Congregational Church, whilst preaching to his cone-rogation, quietly slipped off his gloves, and as reported said: ' ' "Our Puritan Fathers never would have made the break they did Jrith Catholic Christianity could they have foreseen as a result thereof the Christless. moribunLfrigid. fruitless Protestantism that can contribute neither warmth, life, inspiration ncr power to lift us above the weariness of sin. Alas! it is only too true that the heavenly city, which our Puritan Fathers yearned for and sought with prayers pray-ers and tears, has become, to many of our Christ-less Christ-less descendants, a frigid city of ice palaces, built of pale negations, cold, cheerless, shining in a pale winter sun with an evanescent glitter of a doubtful doubt-ful and insubstantial intellectual worth. , "As the icebergs from the frozen north floated wiih the ocean currents, only to be melted and disappear dis-appear in the warm waters of the equator, so shall the.se transcendental ice mountains melt in the warmer currents that the Holy Spirit will bring to human hearts from our crucified but now risen and glorified Lord. The full, rich, glorious Christ of Catholic Christianity has been dragged from His throne by these advanced thinkers (God save the mark!) and reduced to beggary. A pale, bloodless, emaciated Syrian ghost, He still dimly haunts the icy corridors corri-dors of this twentieth century Protestantism, from which the doom of His final exclusion has been already al-ready spoken. "Then in their boundless arrogance and self-assertion self-assertion they turn upon those of us who still cry with Thomas before the Risen One, 'My Lord and my God,' and tell us that there is no middle ground ' between their own vague and sterile rationalism and the Roman Catholic Church. If this be so, then for me, most gratefully and lovingly I turn to the Church of Rome as a homeless, houseless wanderer to ahome in a continuing city. "We are hungry for God, yea, for the living God. and hence so restless and dissatisfied. The husk of life's fruit is growing thicker. and its meat thinner and drier every day for the vast majority of our people. In many and important respects life was brighter in the so-called 'Dark Ages' than it is today. to-day. The seamless robe of Christ is rent into hideous hid-eous fragments and trampled in dirt." A little over ten years ago, John A. Ivensitt. the ultra-Protestant who besides manifesting a bitter antagonism to the Catholic Church itself, specialized, special-ized, so to speak, on trying to destroy the "Catholic party" in the Church of England. He was then Attracting great attention on both sides of the Atlantic At-lantic with his personal interference with the services ser-vices in advanced Anglican Churches in London. The writer has seen the modest little Church of St. Ethelburga in a crowded district of London, where Ivensitt began his campaign. The veneration of the cross on Good Friday, and the Asperges following fol-lowing the Catholic custom of sprinkling the congregation con-gregation with holy water, were naturally very distasteful dis-tasteful to the self -constituted champion of Protestantism. Protest-antism. He got a few drops of the water one day, ' and went to the nearest police court to register a charge of "assault and battery." Freedom of worship, wor-ship, however, prevails in London, and the police was singularly unsentimental. So when Mr. Kensitt tried to break up a ritualistic service in that city, and made off with the. Crucifix, which he had snatched from the hands of tho officiating clergyman, clergy-man, his proclaimed zeal for Protestantism did not avail to, mitigate his offense in disturbing public worship, and he got the ordinary penalty. All these things are naturally recalled by the announcement that one of his late prominent supporters, the Rev. A. C. White, has been received lately into, the Catholic Cath-olic church. Like Ivensitt, Mr. White spent years in denouncing Catholicity up and down the land. Tie was called upon to counteract the literarv activity activ-ity of the Catholic Truth Society of Great Britain, and his pen was long employed in exposing "the errors and superstitions of Rome." He must, however, how-ever, have been an honest man, for as he studied the alleged "errors and superstitions," he gradually became be-came conscious of his own error, and manfully followed fol-lowed the light. While his defection is a hard blow to the followers of Ivensitt, it -rejoices Catholics that another sincere soul has imitated the Scriptural Scriptu-ral example of St. Paul. |