This accounts for the dreadful prejudice of Protestants against the Catholic Church. I have met many non-Catholics who have told me of their firm belief in charges so damnable against Catholic teaching and practice, that if I were in their place I should hate the Church worse than they. Some of the best scholars and the highest type of manhood among Protestants have become Catholics as a result of searching for accusations against the Catholic Church. Their investigations led them to enter the very Church which they set out to assail. That ought to be a convincing argument.
Protestant prejudice is due mainly to the falsehoods which have deluged the Protestant mind.
Let me conclude with a statement of a man who for forty years fought the Catholic Church and sought in every way to discredit and destroy her, but who, eventually, seeing the Church as she is, not as she is caricatured, embraced her and is now her defender. When I am asked what I have found within the Catholic Church superior to all that Protestantism gave me, I find that language is inadequate to express it. One thinks of the familiar metaphor of a stained-glass window in a vast cathedral. Seen from without by day, this seems to be an unintelligible mass of dusky glass. Viewed from within, however, it reveals a beautiful design, where sacred story glows resplendently in form and color.