Note 150 — THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXVII., No. 162.—SEPTEMBER, 1878.

The following article was recently found in Chicago among the posthumous papers of Judge Arrington, who died in that city nine years ago, a convert to the Catholic Church. It was written twenty years previous, when he was struggling to escape from the meshes of pantheism, and seems to be a vigorous effort to prove to his own satisfaction the reality of a personal, rational Deity.

Some of the illustrations are recognized as having been used in a similar article published in the Democratic Review about thirty years ago, which was extensively copied, and even translated into the French and German languages. The present is a much more elaborate statement than that, as if the author still dwelt upon the subject, and as the years rolled on wished with increasing knowledge to more strongly substantiate to his intellect what his higher nature so instinctively craved.

At the bar Judge Arrington stood almost without a peer in the great Northwest for legal learning and oratorical power. Whenever he indulged in the luxury of literary and poetical composition he showed an ability that promised a like pre-eminence in those pursuits, had he devoted himself to them.

This struggle of a great mind to fling off the incubus of modern error, whose every maze he had thoroughly explored, coupled with his subsequent conversion to Catholicity and his saint-like death in its communion, is an admirable practical illustration of the truth that nothing short of the light and grace to be found only in the true church of Christ can ever thoroughly satisfy a great soul.