SOME years ago an excommunicated German Roman Catholic gave to one of our colporteurs the following narrative of the circumstances attendant on his conversion: —
“When I was a boy at school I was much struck with the difference between the answers of my Catechism and the texts of Scripture quoted to prove them. These seemed to me so much grander and holier than those. I went to my schoolmaster and asked him if he could not lend me the book from which the proofs were taken. He merely laughed and said nothing. On the occasion of my first communion I told my confessor, in the confessional, of my desire to have the Holy Scriptures. He rebuked and chided me mildly, telling me that that book was not for such as me.
“Still the thought of the Holy Scriptures was continually in my mind, only I thought of it as a book destined for holier and purer hands than mine. I married, and now I did what I could to secure my soul’s salvation. I prayed in my family and in my church. I gave alms. I went on pilgrimages, but the thought of the Holy Scriptures and the blessedness of those who were worthy to read them was ever present to my mind. One day I came home to dinner; my eye caught something placed on the canopy of my bed. It was a little book, plainly bound, quite new. A strange feeling seized me. I trembled. I said not a word, but as soon as I was alone I took up the book and read, ‘The New Testament!’ I was thunderstruck, and hid the book immediately. How it came there I could not tell, nor can I now.”
He then describes the fearful agony of mind which he endured whilst struggling with conscience, and deciding the question whether he should read the book or no. At length, having resolved to do so, he adds: —
“I then read. When I came to the 18th verse of the 1St chapter of Matthew I seemed to breathe a new air. Joseph, Mary, Bethlehem, John the Baptist, were old familiar names. I shall never, no, not in eternity, forget the effect produced on my mind by the Sermon on the Mount. With every successive paragraph new light kept pouring in.
What I did not understand I read again. True, the reading of these chapters awakened new thoughts and inflicted deep wounds on my conscience; but then I had the infallible Physician at hand.
“I kept my secret almost entirely to myself, my wife alone sharing it. Soon I felt scruples of conscience as to addressing prayer to the Virgin. I quietly dropped the usual addresses and prayers to Mary from our daily devotions. Somehow it became known. One day the priest stepped in, as if by accident, when we were at dinner. I felt that the crisis had come. Should I, just for the sake of peace, put in a short address to the Virgin, in returning thanks for our mid-day meal? I felt I dared not. So I thanked God through Christ, and then was silent.”
“The priest asked me to explain what I had done, and I told him the whole truth. A storm of trouble then burst upon me. The people in the parish were warned to have nothing to do with me, and at last I was excommunicated, and my wife shared my lot.”
Such was the old man’s story. Not long after he told it, God was pleased to take him to be with the Lord Jesus Christ.