There was the Abbe Walter Montagu, Lord Mandeville's
brother, and one or two others, who had despaired of our Church and
joined hers, and she was always inviting them and setting them to
argue with us. Indeed, she declared that one chief reason of her
desiring this wedding for me was that it would bring me within the
fold of the true Church. They told us that our delusion, as they
called our Church, was dead; that the Presbyterians and Fifth
Monarchy men and all their rabble had stifled the last remnant of
life that had been left in her; that the Episcopacy, even if we
scouted the Nag's Head fable, was perishing away, and that England
was like Holland or the Palatinate. But Eustace smiled gravely at
them, and asked whether the Church had been dead when the Roman
Emperors, or the heretic Arians, persecuted her, and said that he
knew that, even if he never should see it, she would revive brighter
and purer than ever--as indeed it has been given to us to behold.
That dear brother, he was so unlike the Calvinists, and held so much
in common with the French Church, that the priests always thought
they were converting him; but he stood all the firmer for knowing
what was truly Catholic. Of course it was no wonder that as Walter
Montagu, like all my Lord Mandeville's sons, had been bred a Puritan,
he should have been amazed to perceive that the Roman Catholics were
not all that they had been painted, and should find rest in the
truths that had been hidden from him; but with us it was quite
otherwise, having ever known the best alike of ours and of theirs.
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