Orestes Brownson: American Chesterton?

Orestes Brownson was quoted several times in Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent, always as a Jacksonian Democrat firebrand. And that he was—for a time. His intellectual journey had taken him from Presbyterianism to Universalism to Transcendentalism, but then he made a sudden turn to Roman Catholicism and repudiated the trajectory of much of his earlier thinking. He wrote voluminously throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. I hadn't previously heard of any American Catholic intellectuals in the nineteenth century, but it seems that he's well-remembered in certain Catholic circles, and, I suppose, among scholars of the Transcendentalist movement Brownson abandoned. Brownson laid out his political philosophy in his book The American Republic, through which I would love to browse someday.

At any rate, I did manage to thumb through a 1855 anthology of his Brownson's work, and stumbled upon his essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Evidently Brownson took Kant very seriously, and worried a great deal about the implications of Kantian reasoning. Here's an excerpt (and this is where today's post ties back to yesterday's):

Kant himself believed, many have since believed, that his Critic [sic] is a refutation of Hume; we regard it as the most masterful defense of Hume that man may be expected to produce. . . . The Critic of Pure Reason [sic], we all know, is confessedly atheistic; it leaves no space for faith in God, and Kant was obliged to write his Critic of the Practical Reason in order to restore the faith it had overthrown.

-Orestes Brownson. “Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.” The Brownson Reader, ed. Alvan Ryan. New York: P.J. Kennedy, 1955.

I don't have much more to say about Kant, but my question is this: do you detect a hint of that Chestertonian art of witty reversal in this passage? Is that just something that happens to people who spend time trying to explain scholastic philosophy to ordinary people? Unfortunately, I don't recall whether this particular passage was written before or after Brownson swam the Tiber...