He was heard to say in after years that, had he not found Catholicity true, he would have been thrown back into a scepticism so painful as to suggest suicide as a relief.

Yet those who have trodden any of the paths which lead from inherited heresy to true doctrine, will appreciate the force of the influences, both personal and social, which induced him to reconsider, and make for himself the grand rounds of Protestant orthodoxy before turning his back upon it for ever.
We find him, therefore, going diligently to all who claimed to be watchmen on the walls of Sion, to seek from each one personally that countersign which would tally with the divine word nature and grace were uttering in his own soul.

He interviewed ministers repeatedly.
"Not having had," he wrote in this magazine for November, 1887, "personal and experimental knowledge of the Protestant denominations, I investigated them all, going from one of them to another--Episcopal, Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and all--conferring with their ministers and reading their books.

It was a dreary business, but I did it.

I knew Transcendentalism well and had been a radical socialist.