The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience

The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience (1857) is Orestes Brownson’s account of one of the most restless intellectual pilgrimages in American religious history. Before his reception into the Catholic Church, Brownson had passed through outright skepticism, Owenite socialism, Universalism, and Unitarian rationalism — and this book retraces that journey stage by stage.

What sets the narrative apart is its emphasis on reasoning rather than feeling. Brownson, among the most combative men of letters of his century, reconstructs the arguments and convictions that carried him through each position and finally into Catholicism, presenting his conversion as the conclusion of a long chain of thought.

As a firsthand document it is doubly valuable: a record of one man’s mind and a map of the religious and social currents of antebellum America, written by someone who had lived inside several of them. It remains one of the major documents of nineteenth-century American religious life, told in Brownson’s own voice.

Our public-domain edition presents Brownson’s text in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, and we link to a free source as well.

Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803–1876) was one of the most restless minds in nineteenth-century America. Before he was forty he had passed, in earnest, through nearly every religious and social position the young republic had to offer: raised among plain New England Congregationalists, he became in turn a Presbyterian, a Universalist minister, a village skeptic, a labor agitator and editor of freethinking journals, a socialist and world-reformer in the circle of Frances Wright and the Saint-Simonians, and a Transcendentalist admired by Emerson's set. In 1844, to the scandal of literary Boston, he entered the Roman Catholic Church, where he remained for the rest of his life.

The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience (1857) is his own account of that long road. It is not an apology written from the safety of arrival so much as an autopsy of each position he held, performed by a man determined to be fair to the views he had left behind and unsparing about his own errors along the way. He wrote it, he said, not to celebrate his conversion but to trace the reasoning by which one honest mind moved from unbelief and reform-movement enthusiasm toward the Church — chapter by chapter, argument by argument.

This edition presents Brownson's text in a clean, readable form. The source was an 1857 first printing, and preparing it meant a full pass of optical-character-recognition repair — mending the scanner's misreadings, rejoining words broken across page breaks, and clearing away the page numbers that clutter a scanned book — with care taken not to modernize Brownson's own nineteenth-century spelling and style. The text itself is unabridged and unaltered.

Eight running heads survived that first pass, and this note used to claim they had not. Where a page turned mid-sentence the scan had dropped the head and its page number between the two halves — "CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. y", "METHODS OF WORLD-REFORM. Ill" for 111, "UNION AND PROGRESS. l7l" for 171 — so a reader met them standing in the middle of a sentence. All eight are now gone and the sentences they interrupted are whole again. Nine chapters opened "I WAS", "I HAD", "I RESUMED", where the printer set the first words in small capitals and the scanner read them as shouting; those read normally now.

His paragraphs have been broken up. Brownson wrote at a median of 123 words to the paragraph and ran to 503 in one place, which is a wall of type to a reader today; the median is now 67. Every break falls at a sentence he had already ended, and the pass that makes them adds and removes nothing but a blank line — it checks, chapter by chapter, that the words and their order are exactly what they were. His sentences, his spelling and his arguments are untouched.

The Convert is in the public domain. What we offer is this edition — the typesetting and the editorial care that make it pleasant to read. The original scan remains freely available, and we link it on the book's page.