1. James Freeman Clarke, "Orestes A. Brownson's Argument for the Roman Catholic Church," Christian Examiner 47 (1849): 247.

2. Orestes A. Brownson, The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience , in Works , 5:158-59. Subsequent references give pages only.

3. Brownson, The Convert , 16. The lawyer and future governor of Oregon Peter Burnett was among several converts whose vision of Catholic community clearly derived from Milner, Moehler, and Brownson. In 1859 Burnett published an eight-hundred-page treatise on the reasonableness of his new faith. For Burnett, Protestantism maintained "'its painful preeminence' . . . [only] through mighty crimination, and by wading through the moral slaughter of the Christian world" (Peter H. Burnett, The Path Which Led a Protestant Lawyer to the Catholic Church , 725). Such crimes demanded extensive countermeasures. With an attention to detail bordering on mania, Burnett expounded the analogies between Anglo-American jurisprudence and the Roman Catholic church to prove the reasonableness of the latter's structure and claims. For lawyer Burnett, the "mixed codes of jurisprudence" (12) represented by the oral and written traditions of common and statutory law operated

like tradition and Scripture in the church. With a somewhat perverse ingenuity, he argued that English law confirmed the validity of papal claims. "That tradition . . . is a safe, certain, and efficient means of transmission, is demonstrated in the case of the common law of England" (15). In Burnett's reasoning, a tribunal of last resort (like the United States Supreme Court) was necessary to construe the meaning of Christ's law; the Savior naturally provided for such a judicial body by establishing the Roman church. Because Christ, as legislator, spoke the language of precedent and legislative clarity, the scriptural passage granting Peter the keys to heaven fully justified the Roman church's literal interpretation of that passage.

Brownson correctly predicted that most readers would be offended by Burnett's conversion narrative precisely because of its insistent (and voluminous) logic. Said Brownson of American readers: "They are not accustomed to find or to expect certainty in matters of religion, and they feel it a sort of insult to their understanding when you present them a religion which demands and seems to have certainty" (Brownson, "Burnett's Path to the Church," in Works , 20:95). Bent on demonstrating that Christ intended a perfect and visible unity, Burnett consciously opposed the era's various experimental utopian communities, which based themselves on the ties of intuitive affinity between their members, with his vision of the church as "that sacred union which holds men together, not merely as constituents of a community, but as members of one mystical body; not cemented together by the sense of mutual want, or strung one unto the other by the ties of the flesh, or the interests of the world, but firmly united by the headship of One, in whom the sublimest thought reposes, as in its proper sphere, and inly communicating through the circulation of vital influences, passing from one unto the other" (59).

In striking contrast to the liberal Protestant investment in skepticism and ambivalence, Burnett's argument forcefully appealed to the validity of human testimony and mediation. Not only Christ and his apostles but one's fellow creatures were worthy of trust. In his chapter on miracles, for example, he accuses Hume and Paley of a "distrust of human veracity" (245) and seeks to defend the Church's confidence in those who witnessed the prodigies of her saints. To do otherwise was to consign oneself to a mean-spirited dimension reserved for those who chose one or another Protestant sect. "The convert from the Catholic Church seems conscious that he is embracing an inferior and lower grade of faith, and adopting a colder and more suspicious estimate of human veracity" (738).

4. The Convert , 143.

5. Ibid., 48.

6. Ibid., 4.

7. Orestes A. Brownson, "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus," in Works , 4:142. See also Donald Capps, "Orestes Brownson," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7 (1968); Henry F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson's Early Life ; Thomas R. Ryan, Orestes A. Brownson ; and John A. Coleman, An American Strategic Theology , especially chap. 4.

8. Orestes A. Brownson, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church (Boston, 1836), in Works , 4:54. See also Brownson to Victor Cousin, November 15, 1836: "Your work Sir, found me sunk in vague sentimentalism, no longer a sceptic, but unable to find any scientific basis for my belief. I despaired of passing from the subjective to the objective. You have corrected and aided me; you have enabled me to find a scientific basis for my belief in Nature, in God and Immortality, and I thank you again and again for the service you have done me" (as quoted in Daniel R. Barnes, "An Edition of the Early Letters of Orestes Brownson," 135).

9. Brownson, "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus," 155.

10. Ibid., 156.

11. Ibid., 169, 165.

12. Ralph Waldo Emerson to Elizabeth Peabody, as quoted in Ryan, Orestes A. Brownson , 112.

13. Brownson, "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus," 129.

14. Brownson, The Convert , 140.

15. "Catholic Literature in the United States," Metropolitan 2 (1854): 69.

16. Orestes A. Brownson, "Bancroft's History of the United States," in Works , 19:411. Years later, in The American Republic , Brownson would describe humanism as a Satanic conspiracy: "His [Satan's] favorite guise in modern times is that of philanthropy. He is a genuine humanitarian, and aims to persuade the world that humanitarianism is Christianity, and that man is God" (362).

17. Orestes A. Brownson, "Archbishop Spalding," in Works , 14:513.

18. Orestes A. Brownson, "The Mission of America," Brownsoh's Quarterly Review (1856), in Works , 11:567-68.

19. Orestes A. Brownson, "The Philosophy of History," in Works , 4:419. The article originally appeared in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review 12 (1843). See also Thomas A. Ryan, "Orestes A. Brownson and Historiography." R. G. Collingwood, in The Idea of History , aptly describes the confusion surrounding humanity's role in history and the Christian notion of Providence:

In one sense man is the agent throughout history, for everything that happens in history happens by his will; in another sense God is the sole agent, for it is only by the working of God's providence that the operation of man's will at any given moment leads to this result, and not to a different one. In one sense, again, man is the end for whose sake historical events

happen, for God's purpose is man's well-being; in another sense man exists merely as a means to the accomplishment of God's ends, for God has created him only in order to work out His purpose in terms of human life. But this new attitude to human action gained enormously, because the recognition that what happens in history need not happen through anyone's deliberately wishing it to happen is an indispensable precondition of understanding any historical process. (48)

20. Brownson, ''Bancroft's History," 386.

21. Orestes A. Brownson, The Spirit-Rapper: An Autobiography , preface. Further references to this volume are given parenthetically in the text.

22. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia , for Augustine "the struggle between faith and unbelief is the master theme of world history" (s.v. "Ecclesiastical Historiography"). On Brownson and Hawthorne, see Carolyn L. Karcher, "Philanthropy and the Occult," in Howard Kerr et al., eds., The Haunted Dusk , 69-97.

23. "Notices of Recent Publications," Christian Examiner 56 (1854): 449.

24. William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland Showing How That Event Has Impoverished and Degraded the Main Body of the People in Those Countries . . . (London, 1824), Letter IV.

25. Orestes A. Brownson, "Cardinal Wiseman's Essays," Brownson's Quarterly Review (1853), in Works , 10:452.

26. Cobbett, Letter IV.

27. Orestes A. Brownson, "Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism," Brownson's Quarterly Review 3 (1846): 382.

28. Ibid., 383.

29. Orestes A. Brownson, The American Republic , 423.

30. For Brownson's views on America becoming "permanently Protestant," see Thomas T. McAvoy, "Orestes A. Brownson and American History," Catholic Historical Review 40 (1954).

31. Brownson to Hecker, August 25, 1870, in Correspondence , 291.