The Force of Good Example

New Zealand Tablet, 23 March 1911, Page 515

The Force of Good Example

It is not every Catholic that has had the happiness to help a convert into the Church, but that every Catholic may some day be the means under God of a non-Catholic accepting the true faith is evident by recitals by converts of the influences brought to bear on them on their Road to Rome (says a writer in St. Peter’s Net). The smallest things sometimes turn the hearts of men and women toward the Church. A learned jurist in Washington became a convert through hearing sung the Preface at a High Mass in one of the city’s churches; another gentleman in the same city became so indignant and disgusted at the unmerited abuse heaped upon the Church of his wife by a Presbyterian minister that he seized his hat, left the church, and some time afterwards entered the Church. A young lawyer in Ohio was converted by a discussion between an over-zealous Protestant and a Catholic in a railway train; a candidate for the Protestant ministry in Baltimore, bought by mistake _ a Catholic book at a second-hand book store, and through its instrumentality became a Catholic; a priest, accompanied by a seminarian, on a missionary journey in Indiana, sought lodgings for the night at a house in which a woman lay dying, praying God to enlighten her as to the true religion in the midst of so many conflicting sects, and before morning she died in peace of soul a member of the true faith. One of our best known American priests was in his boyhood converted by reading a scrap from a Catholic paper, picked up from some waste paper; the faith came to the village of -Newton, N.C., by a doctor reading a sermon of Archbishop Hughes in a newspaper that came wrapped around some goods, and who not only himself became a Catholic, but was the' means of converting the entire village. A list of this nature might be continued indefinitely. Among any collection of conversion stories we are sure to note that many of the converts were brought into the Church either directly or indirectly through the influence of some Catholic. Sometimes an intelligent answer to an inquiry concerning a Catholic doctrine will start the searcher on an investigation that is certain to lead him into the Church. Again, the lending of a Catholic book to a Protestant may be the means of presenting the truth to him.