disappointed, was not discouraged. He saw plainly, reading between the lines of the refusal, that the daughter's affections were his, while through obedience and submissiveness she wrote according to the decision of her more worldly-minded parents. He refused to give up, and was finally rewarded by a reversal of the unfavorable decision. From that time he corresponded regularly with Miss Cowles, and awaited only the completion of his studies to make her his wife.

CHAPTER V

BEGINNINGS OF THE CATHOLIC MOVEMENT

Before attempting to trace the path on which his unflinching loyalty to truth and reason led our young seminarian until it ultimately brought him home to the great Dwelling Place of all religious truth, we must go back to give some idea of the state of religious belief in his day and the intellectual forces that were at work around him.

There exists a popular impression that the great movement of return to the Catholic Church which has been so marked a feature of the nineteenth century began with the Tractarians in England and owed to them almost exclusively its origin and development, not only in England, but in all English-speaking countries, and even throughout the world. But a very slight degree of reading and study, especially now that the first impetus of the movement has spent itself, will suffice to show that this view is quite erroneous. The Oxford Movement is now seen to have been only an incident, though a most important incident, in a far more widespread drama; it was only one current,

though a very powerful current, in the great stream which was slowly but surely setting back toward the sea from which it had come. The reaction was evident in several countries of Europe, particularly Germany and France, even before the French Revolution had fairly exhausted itself. The first movers in the reaction were not always Catholics, nor scarcely even Christians. In Germany, much may be attributed to Herder and Goethe, and a little later, Schiller. They were poets, lovers of beauty. True religion is always poetical; for poetry is the language of emotion and of the ideal clothed in concrete forms. In Protestantism these men found neither poetry nor beauty; they discovered them in the Catholic Church. They expressed their admiration freely, and made use in their works of the noble and elevated ideas thus gained, and so contributed to the spread of Catholic sentiments while themselves remaining Rationalists or Pantheists. The study of medieval art-poetry, sculpture and painting, but above all, of the Gothic architecture, with the monuments of which Germany is so abundantly supplied-led minds insensibly to the great Church which had been the inspiration and the guardian of these masterpieces. Added to these elements, was a more impartial study of the history of the middle ages. The distinguished historian, Leopold

Friedrich, Count Stolberg, came into the Church in 1800 and by his History of the Religion of Jesus Christ was mainly instrumental in the conversion of Prince Adolphus of Mecklenberg. In 1805 came the conversion of Friedrich von Schlegel and his gifted wife. Schlegel's influence was very great, and he has been called the Messiah of the German Romantic School of literature. His works on the History of Literature and the Philosophy of History are still of great value. Overbeck the artist, with a number of friends, came in about 1814 and founded a new Christian school of painting. The two brothers Veit (painters) were converted Jews. Klinkowströne, Wilhelm and Rudolf Schadow (the latter a sculptor), Vogelstein, Schnorr, Platner, and Müller, were members of this remarkable aggregation. Joseph Görres and Clemens Brentano, though born and baptized Catholics, were practically converts to the Faith, as was also the Princess Gallitzin, a German lady married in Russia. The poet Werner, the poetess Luise Hensel, many members of sovereign houses and of the nobility and aristocracy, jurists and historians, swelled the ranks and even ministers of religion were not wanting. In the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, the conversion in 1820 of Karl Ludwig von Haller, a Councilor of State of Berne, and a political writer of Euro

pean fame, followed by the publication of his letter to his family giving an account of his step, caused a great sensation, though it did not give rise to any definite local movement of return. Möhler's Symbolik, one of the greatest works of the nineteenth century, though rather a fruit than a cause of the movement, yet contributed most powerfully after its appearance to sustaining and spreading the truth. The conversion of the historians Hurter, Gfrörer, Onno Klopp and others, was also one of the later fruits of the reaction.

In France, the Faith had never been extinguished. It only remained quiescent under the ashes heaped upon it by the Revolution and the Terror. As soon as partial freedom was restored under Napoleon, it flamed forth again. Churches were opened, seminaries reëstablished, religious congregations founded, and— best sign of all of the presence of an ardent faith-colleges for the training of priests for foreign missions were put in operation. Although compelled to struggle with revolutionary hate on one side and bureaucratic oppression, scarcely less atheistic and fatal, on the other, the Church showed wonderful vitality, and the result was a powerful reaction in favor of religion. To give anything like a list of the converts would be impossible. Rendered attractive to the popular mind by the genius of