Cardinal Wiseman's Fabiola.

"I now understood the Memorare and the Sub tuum; I began to recite the Ave Maria, to salute together with the angel the Mother of my God, to seek her compassion, that she might obtain for me grace to be completely enlightened, and to enter into the Saviour's one fold. The sting of doubt tormented me unceasingly; on my knees, before my crucifix in my lonely chamber, I experienced the most painful struggles. As I had ever preserved such fragments of Christian truth as the Reformers had spared, and as for many long years I had occupied myself with the solution of the leading questions in philosophy and theology, it appeared to me very hard to submit my reason to the yoke of faith. But prayer removed all these obstacles, and when soon after I came to knock at the door of the Church, I found it easy to assent to all the truths that were proposed to my belief" (p. 163).

With many other Protestants, he assisted at the exercises of a mission given at Berlin by the Jesuit Fathers, and reaped therefrom much benefit. In July, 1858, he received permission from the minister of worship to explore the libraries of Germany and northern Italy, to collect such manuscripts of Eusebius as might be found, with a view to a new revision of the text of that historian. He visited Leipsic, Dresden, Vienna, Venice, Padua, Milan, and Munich. At Dresden, Wolfgang de Goethe took him to be a Catholic priest. At Venice he met with F. Ignazio Mozzoni, of the order of St. John of God, author of a remarkable history of the Church, and was edified by the piety and the literary activity of the Mechitarists. The intercourse he had with Catholic ecclesiastics, and the sight of Catholic ceremonies and rites, were of signal service to him by removing unfavourable impressions. Among other details he tells us:

"I shall never forget a certain Irish Dominican, the very type of a perfect religious, who aroused in me profound emotions by the account he gave me of the sad condition of his fellow-countrymen, crushed by English rule" (p. 191).

His scientific mission was finished at Munich, whither he returned from his long journey still a Protestant. But the end was at hand, and we must allow him to describe it in his own words:

"After leaving Munich, I continued for some weeks to suffer great anguish of mind. At length the decisive hour came, and the sun of grace had completed the work of my enlightenment. I decided to become a Catholic on the 14th of October, 1858, the feast of St. Theresa, whose powerful intercession strengthened my weakness. I communicated my resolutions to the minister of worship and to the faculty of theology of Berlin, and I requested my bishop—the Bishop of Ermland—to receive me into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, in which, after long and painful struggles, I had at length recognized the depositary of the truth, and the legitimate spouse of the Son of God: thus would my heart be at peace. 'Glory and praise', said my letter, 'to our Lord Jesus Christ, who has enabled me to surmount all obstacles, who has graciously heard my prayers, who has had pity on me, who has broken my chains, who has scattered the darkness that hung over me, who has shown me the path to the fold. Since conscientious investigations have proved to me that the so-called Reformation of the sixteenth century has but disfigured the type of the true Church of Jesus Christ, and that its principles, far from being salutary, are essentially destructive and the necessary cause of the effects which history has registered during three centuries—that the Protestant confessions and their apologists, instead of attacking the Church's genuine teaching, do but distort it to insure an easy victory; since I am convinced that the Reformers had neither the duty nor the right to attempt a reform apart from and against the head of the Church and the episcopate; that the religious divisions of our age are caused by the refusal to submit to the Church and return to the centre whence we departed in the sixteenth century; since the historical development of the Church has been proved to me unbroken down to the present day; since I have learned to justify and love her doctrine, her morality, and her worship; from the day on which the grace of God has permitted me to be convinced of these truths, my return to the Catholic Church has become a matter of necessity, and it is only by a public confession of my faith that I can hope to regain tranquillity of conscience, that peace of the heart which the world cannot give, nor yet, in spite of all its fraud and anger, can ever take away'".