“April 24, Noon.—­The Catholic Church alone seems to satisfy my wants, my faith, life, soul.  These may be baseless fabrics, chimeras dire, or what you please.  I may be laboring under a delusion.  Yet my soul is Catholic, and that faith responds to my soul in its religious aspirations and its longings.  I have not wished to make myself Catholic, but that answers on all sides to the wants of my soul.  It is so rich, so full.  One is in harmony all over—­in unison with heaven, with the present, living in the natural body, and the past, who have changed.  There is a solidarity between them through the Church.  I do not feel controversial.  My soul is filled.”

From this point he speedily recedes.  By the next day he is “lost almost in the flesh”; “fallen into an identity with my body,” and notes that for some time he has “done little in study, but feel that I have lived very much.”  What hinders him he supposes to be “contemplating any certain amount of study which I ought to accomplish—­looking to it as an end.  Why should I not be satisfied when I am living, growing?  Did Christ and His apostles study languages?  I have the life—­is not that the end?”

“April 28.—­What shall I say?  Am I wrong?  Should I submit and give myself up to that which does not engage my whole being?  To me the Church is not the great object of life.  I am now out of it in the common meaning.  I am not subject to its ordinances.  Is it not best for me to accept my own nature rather than attempt to mould it as though it were an object?  Is not our own existence more than this existence in the world?

“I read this morning an extract from Heine upon Schelling which affected me more than anything I have read for six months.  The Church, says Schelling in substance, was first Petrine, then Pauline, and must be love-embracing, John-like.  Peter, Catholicism; Paul, Protestantism; John, what is to be.  The statement struck me and responded to my own dim intuitions.  Catholicism is solidarity; Protestantism is individuality.  What we want, and are tending to, is what shall unite them both, as John’s spirit does—­and that in each individual.  We want neither the authority of History nor of the Individual; neither Infallibility nor Reason by itself but both combined in Life.  Neither Precedent nor Opinion, but Being—­neither a written nor a preached Gospel, but a living one. . . .

“It is only through Christ we can see the love, goodness, and wisdom of God.  He is to us what the telescope is to the astronomer, with this difference:  He so exalts and purifies us that our subject becomes the power to see.  The telescope is a medium through which the boundaries of our vision are enlarged, but it is passive.  Christ is an active Mediator who begets us if we will, and gives us power to see by becoming one with Him.”