His real name was Samuel.He was a Jew, and born in a little village in the neighborhood of Innspruck.His family, which possessed a considerable fortune, left him, in his early youth, completely free to his own pursuits.From infancy he had shown that these were serious.He loved to be alone and passed his days, and sometimes his nights, wandering among the mountains and valleys in the neighborhood of his birthplace.He would often sit by the brink of torrents, listening to the voice of their waters, and endeavoring to penetrate the meaning which Nature had hidden in those sounds.As he advanced in years, his inquiries became more curious and more grave.It was necessary that he should receive a solid education, and his parents sent him to study in the German universities.Luther had been dead only a century, and his words and his memory still lived in the enthusiasm of his disciples.
The new faith was strengthening the conquests it had made; the Reformers were as ardent as in the first days, but their ardor was more enlightened and more measured.Proselytism was still carried on with zeal, and new converts were made every day.In listening to the morality and to the dogmas which Lutheranism had taken from Catholicism, Samuel was filled with admiration.His bold and sincere spirit instantly compared the doctrines which were now submitted to him, with those in the belief of which he had been bred; and, enlightened by the comparison, was not slow to acknowledge the inferiority of Judaism.He said to himself, that a religion made for a single people, to the exclusion of all others,--which only offered a barbarous justice for rule of conduct,--which neither rendered the present intelligible nor satisfactory, and left the future uncertain,--could not be that of noble souls and lofty intellects; and that he could not be the God of truth who had dictated, in the midst of thunder, his vacillating will, and had called to the performance of his narrow wishes the slaves of a vulgar terror.Always conversant with himself, Samuel, who had spoken what he thought, now performed what he had spoken; and, a year after his arrival in Germany, solemnly abjured Judaism, and entered into the bosom of the Reformed Church.As he did not wish to do things by halves, and desired as much as was in him to put off the old man and lead a new life, he changed his name of Samuel to that of Peter.Some time passed, during which he strengthened and instructed himself in his new religion.Very soon he arrived at the point of searching for objections to refute, and adversaries to overthrow.Bold and enterprising, he went at once to the strongest, and Bossuet was the first Catholic author that he set himself to read.He commenced with a kind of disdain; believing that the faith which he had just embraced contained the pure truth.
He despised all the attacks which could be made against it, and laughed already at the irresistible arguments which he was to find in the works of the Eagle of Meaux.But his mistrust and irony soon gave place to wonder first, and then to admiration: he thought that the cause pleaded by such an advocate must, at least, be respectable; and, by a natural transition, came to think that great geniuses would only devote themselves to that which was great.He then studied Catholicism with the same ardor and impartiality which he had bestowed on Lutheranism.He went into France to gain instruction from the professors of the Mother Church, as he had from the Doctors of the reformed creed in Germany.He saw Arnauld Fenelon, that second Gregory of Nazianzen, and Bossuet himself.
Guided by these masters, whose virtues made him appreciate their talents the more, he rapidly penetrated to the depth of the mysteries of the Catholic doctrine and morality.He found, in this religion, all that had for him constituted the grandeur and beauty of Protestantism,--the dogmas of the Unity and Eternity of God, which the two religions had borrowed from Judaism; and, what seemed the natural consequence of the last doctrine--a doctrine, however, to which the Jews had not arrived--the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; free will in this life; in the next, recompense for the good, and punishment for the evil.He found, more pure, perhaps, and more elevated in Catholicism than in Protestantism, that sublime morality which preaches equality to man, fraternity, love, charity, renouncement of self, devotion to your neighbor;Catholicism, in a word, seemed to possess that vast formula, and that vigorous unity, which Lutheranism wanted.The latter had, indeed, in its favor, the liberty of inquiry, which is also a want of the human mind; and had proclaimed the authority of individual reason: but it had so lost that which is the necessary basis and vital condition of all revealed religion--the principle of infallibility; because nothing can live except in virtue of the laws that presided at its birth; and, in consequence, one revelation cannot be continued and confirmed without another.Now, infallibility is nothing but revelation continued by God, or the Word, in the person of his vicars.
"At last, after much reflection, Hebronius acknowledged himself entirely and sincerely convinced, and received baptism from the hands of Bossuet.He added the name of Spiridion to that of Peter, to signify that he had been twice enlightened by the Spirit.
