AT THE DOOR OF THE CHURCH THE first effect of Brownson's letter was to throw its recipient into a state of great though brief perplexity.

That final struggle, strange and painful, in which the soul for the last time contends against its happiness; in which it is drawn by an invincible attraction, knowing that it will yield yet striving still to resist; is one that must remain but half-comprehended by most of those to whom Catholic truth is an inheritance.

And yet there is an explanation which Father Hecker himself would possibly have given.
"Do you know what God is ?" he said to the present writer in 1882, in that abrupt fashion with which he often put the deepest questions.
"That is not what I mean," he went on, after getting a conventional reply: "I'll tell you what God is.

_He is the eternal Lover of the soul."_ That shudder of blind aversion which is a part of the experience of so many converts, is an instinctive testimony that the call to the truth is more than natural, while the overpowering attraction which attends it witnesses that nature must needs obey or perish.

The Church, too, is not heard by the soul merely as the collective voice of many men and ages of men agreed upon the truth, but as a mystic personality which makes her the imperative ambassadress of Christ.