same.  When I think of the perfect happiness which used to be my lot at this season of the year, a great sadness comes over me, especially when I remember that I have said an everlasting farewell to these blissful days.  I don’t know whether you are like me, but there is nothing more painful to me than to have to say, even in respect to the most trifling matter, “It is all over, for once and all.”  What must I suffer, then, when I have to say this of the only pleasures which in my heart I cared for?  But what can be done?  I do not repent anything, and the suffering induced in the cause of duty brings with it a joy far greater than those which may have been sacrificed to it.  I thank God for having given me in you one who understands me so well that I have no need even to lay bare the state of my heart to him.  Yes, it is one of my chief sorrows to think that the persons whose approbation would be the most precious to me must blame me and condemn me.  Fortunately that will not prevent them from pitying and loving me.

I am not one of those who are constantly preaching tolerance to the orthodox; this is the cause of numberless sophisms for the superficial minds in both camps.  It is unfair upon Catholicism to dress it up according to our modern ideas, in addition to which this can only be done by verbal concessions which denote bad faith or frivolity.  All or nothing, the Neo-Catholics are the most foolish of any.

No, my dear friend, do not scruple to tell me that I am in this state through my own fault; I feel sure that you must think so.  It is of course painful for me to think that perhaps as much as half of the enlightened portion of humanity would tell me that I am hateful in the sight of God, and to use the old Christian phraseology, which is the true one, that if death overtook me, I should be immediately damned.  This is terrible, and it used to make me tremble, for somehow or other the thought of death always seems to me very close at hand.  But I have got hardened to it, and I can only wish to the orthodox a peace of mind equal to that which I enjoy.  I may safely say that since I accomplished my sacrifice, amid outward sorrows greater than would be believed, and which, from perhaps a false feeling of delicacy, I have concealed from every one, I have tasted a peace which was unknown to me during periods of my life to all appearance more serene.  You must not accept, my dear friend, certain generalities in regard to happiness which are very erroneous, and all of which assume that one cannot be happy except by consistency, and with a perfectly harmonized intellectual system.  At this rate, no one would be happy, or only those whose limited intelligence could not rise to the conception of problems or of doubt.  It is fortunately not so; and we owe our happiness to a piece of inconsistency, and to a certain turn of the wheel which causes us to take patiently what with another turn of the wheel would be absolute torture.  I imagine that you