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10 THE BULLETIN OF THE CATHOLIC LAYMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF GEORGIA DR. KINSMAN’S CONVERSION Former Episcopalian Writes Book on the Reasons Which Led Him to Join the Catholic Church. (From The Brooklyn Tablet.) Dr. Frederick J. Kinsman, formerly Episcopalian Bishop of Delaware, whose reception into the Church was announced some months ago, now a layman in the Church, has written the story of his conversion, entitled “Salve Mater.” It is an “apology” for his life in which he sketches his Career not only as a student, layman minister and Bishop, but also un veils the struggle of mind and the conflicting emo tions which surged through his soul during a period which he describes as a “time of perplexity, fluctua tions of feeling and judgment, inconsistency and par alysis of the will” involved in his decision. “During the past year,” writes Dr. Kinsman in the opening chapter of the book, which is being sold by Longmans, Green & Co., “I have had to make three decisions, vitally important to myself, and significant to friends as indicating aban donment of convictions which we have long shared as the basis of our lives. In the first place, it be came necessary for me to resign my jurisdiction over the Diocese of Delaware, of which I had been Bishop for over ten years; in the second, to renounce the orders of the Episcopal Church; and in the third, its communion. These decisions were followed by the recognition of the duty to seek admission into the communion of the Roman Catholic Church.” After stating that the decision about jurisdiction was reached in December, 1918, and the one about orders in June, 1919, and both carried into effect in a letter to the Rt. Rev. Daniel Sylvester Tuttle, pre siding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the former Bishop of Delaware gives the reasons for writing the book. Former Friends. “I owe some account of myself to two sets of people,” he says; “first, to my friends in the Epis copal Church, especially my people in Delaware, and second, to my pupils of past years, who will wish to know the reasons which have forced abandonment of what they knew to have been firmly held convictions.” That he should explain to his friends in the Episcopal Church—to laymen, ministers and Bishops why he should leave the Episcopal Church and join the Ro man Catholic Church is reasonable from the fact that Dr. Kinsman himself had often said to his friends that the Anglicans who were leaders in the Oxford move ment and who became Catholics 'did not represent the most sound and stable elements of the English Church. I contrasted them unfavorably with Keble, Pusey, Church and Liddon,” says Dr. Kinsman. “My three stock examples of the kind of men who 'went to Rome’ were Newman, W. G. Ward and F. W. Faber, attracted, respectively, by overemphasis on church authority, by mere logic and by picturesque devo tions. They were all good and able men, but not quite normal. I had a string of illustrations of pecu liarities and of what I considered false judgments, not collected maliciously or with any conscious unfair ness, but as evidence that ought not to be disregarded that these men were not altogether the equals of those who, in the same situation, stood by the English Church.” After having taken such a prejudiced stand against former Anglican converts to Catholicism, and hav ing upheld this stand before his friends in the Protes tant Episcopal Church, and yet to abandon his for mer convictions, Dr. Kinsman says: “It is therefore altogether just that my old friends have recently been questioning my own sanity. How can one, they have asked, with chances to learn the best life in the Anglican communion, ever prefer anything else? It can only be that he has lost his mind or his char acter; and the former is the more charitable assump tion. This is all quite fair, as judging me by my own old standards, but in being relegated to the awk ward squad of the feeble-minded, it is some comfort to reflect in what company, on my own showing in the days of Anglican complacency, I find myself.” Why He Joined the Church. “Why have I abandoned the Episcopal Church for the Roman Catholic and why did it take so long to see the duty?” Dr. Kinsman says are the two ques tions which he has undertaken to answer in his apol ogy. “To answer the first question,” Dr. Kinsman writes, “It has seemed necessary to give a detailed account of my religious education, indicating certain fixed points which have been decisive in the forma tion of all my ecclesiastical conceptions; to sum marize also an experience in ministerial work which induced the feeling that the Episcopal Church fails to realize ideals which her teaching has made me re gard as all-important; and to outline various revisions of judgment in regard to the Roman Catholic Church, removing prejudice which, until very recently, would have kept me out of her communion, and bringing convictions of the Christian life. I have wished to put myself on record in regard to changes of view on important matters for the sake of correcting what I now regard as erroneous in my former teaching.” The editor of the Catholic paper, “La Croix,” com ments on the election of M. Millerand as follows. “We have favored M. Millerand’s election. His atti tude achieved during the war and particularly in the course of the last few months, aroused our confidence on both national and international policies.”