commonplace life God will always deliver me from that.  Catholicism meets the requirements of all my faculties excepting my critical one, and as I have no reason to hope that matters will mend in this respect I must either abandon Catholicism or amputate this faculty.  This operation is a difficult and a painful one, but you may be sure that if my moral conscience did not stand in the way, that if God came to me this evening and told me that it would be pleasing to Him, I should do it.  You would not recognise me in my new character, for I should cease to study or to indulge in critical thought, and should become a thorough mystic.  You may also be sure that I must have been violently shaken to so much as consider the possibility of such a hypothesis, which forces itself upon me with greater terrors than death itself.  But yet I should not despair of striking, even in this career, a vein of activity which would suffice to keep me going.

And what, all said and done, will be my decision?  It is with indescribable dread that I see the close of the vacation drawing near, for I shall then have to express, by very decisive action, a very undecided inward state.  It is this complication which makes my position peculiarly painful.  So much anxiety unnerves me, and then I feel so plainly that I do not understand matters of this kind, that I shall be certain to make some foolish blunder, and that I shall become a laughing-stock.  I was not born a cunning knave.  They will laugh at my simple-mindedness, and will look upon me as a fool.  If, with all this, I was only sure of what I was doing!  But then, again, supposing that by contact with them I were to lose my purity of heart and my conception of life!  Supposing they were to inoculate me with their positivism!  And even if I were sure of myself, could I be sure of the external circumstances which have so fatal an action upon us?  And who, knowing himself, can be sure that he will be proof against his own weakness?  Is it not indeed the case that God has done me but a poor service?  It seems as if He had employed all His strategy for surrounding me in every direction, and a simple young fellow like myself might have been ensnared with much less trouble.  But for all this I love Him, and am persuaded that He has done all for my good, much as facts may seem to contradict it.  We must take an optimist view for individuals as well as for humanity, despite the perpetual evidence of facts telling the other way.  This is what constitutes true courage; I am the only person who can injure myself.

I often think of you, my dear friend; you should be very happy.  A bright and assured future is opening before you; you have the goal in view, and all you have to do is to march steadily onward to it.  You enjoy the marked advantage of having a strictly defined dogma to go by.  You will retain your breadth of view; and I trust that you may never discover that there is a grievous incompatibility between the