HOW A PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER BECAME A CATHOLIC.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXI, Issue 20, 3 March 1893, Page 27

HOW A PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER BECAME A CATHOLIC.

(New York Freeman, December 3.)

Mb W. H. Thorns, publisher and editor of the Globs Quarterly Review, announces in the latest issue of that periodical that he has entered the fold of the Catholic Church, and gives some of his reasons therefor, together with a short account of hit wandering! for years outside the pale in search of truth and peace. The story is exceedingly interesting. Up to the age of sixteen Mr Thorne, as he says, knew little or nothing of Catholics or of the Catholic Church. All he had heard of them was spoken by hit family and neighbours with bated breath " as of something ghostly, terrible, and of the past." He thus learned to hate and deepta the name of Catholic Mr Tborne joined the Presbyterian ministry, and his original prejudice began to be somewhat modified by personal contact with two or three cultivated Catholic priests. Later he withdrew from the Presbyterian ministry and established in hia mind a system of religion which he termed Cosmotheism. Then he proceeds to toll how at length he reached the true and only Church of God, and does it in very eloquent and touching language. Mr Thorne says : " A few years after the first writing of Cosmotheism, and lay from 1873-1874, till within the past year, I was, when in Philadelphia, a frequent attendant at the Vesper services, or as I have learned to call them, the services of the Benediction, in the Oatholio cathedral on Logan Square, at first I went to hear the music— especially the organ — because it had been built by the father of some Unitarian ladies who had attended my own preachings, and I soon found myself moved by this music as I never bad been moved by any music in Protestant churches. So I continued to go, mainly for a sort of devotional enjoyment. After some years, however, and notably after many and severe trials in my own life, and after much new study along all lines of religious truth, I found myself more moved towards God and peace and duty by the simple services of the Catholic altar than by any Protestant preaching I had ever beard. So the great central fact of the universe— viz, the incarnation of God in Christ, aud the next great world-fact of the incarnation of this Christ in the services of the Catholic Church, came back to me as if out of heaven, until Cosmotheism and all the other voices of human reason seemed to be but the crymgs of a child in tha night, until the door was opened to me also, which no man ehuttetb, and I entered in and found rest and peace. More than that 1 cannot at present reveal; To tell bow, step by step, through years of exactest thought, through blinding tears, through agonies of yearning for the who'e truth and duty — come life, come death— and finally through the bid of a venerable priest and the beautiful kindness and prayers of a company of Christ's own angels, in a sisterhood of the Church, I saw it as ths new Jerusalem of God on earth ; the true bride of Christ, the true ark of human safety ; the perfect ministry to and voicing of the religious human soul ; and how I, too, was enabled to bend the knee befor« its altars and partake of its sacraments would be like tearing one's heart out and holding it up to public gaze — mayhap for daws to peck at or to be trampled under the feet of swine."

Under the heading " Of what Good are Monks," an article appeaiel in a Paris paper, telling what the monks of the Grande* Chartreuse do in the way of charity. They have recently spent two million francs in building houses that had been burnt down at Saint Laurent dv Pont, and in building a large church, a presbytery, and some schools. The diocese of Grenoble alone has reoeived to the amount of twelve million francs. The diocese of Annecy has raised thirty churches in the last fitteen yjars, and, thanks to the monks of the Grande-Chartreuse, for having contributed a third of the expenses.

The statistics of the past year show a continued increase of Cthoho prosperity in Scotland. The dioceee of St Andrews and Edinburgh baa 62 priests, 68 missions, chapels, and stations, and an estimated Catholic populatiou of 52,000 ; Aberdeen, 63 priest*, 54 chapels, and a Catholic population estimated at 12.0U0 ; Duukeld, 36 priests, 33 chapels, and estimated population 30,000 ; Galloway, 25 priests, 41 chapels, and estimated population 17,000; Glasgow, 165 priests, 106 chapels, and estimated Oatholio population of 240,000, giving a total for Scotland of 341 orieats, 202 churches, oaapelf, and stations, and an estimated Catholic population, o| 951,000,