title: Laravel 4 Sentry 2 Authentication Check Without Using `catch`?
body: <p>Suppose I have this code for <code>Sentry</code> authentication:</p>
  
  <pre><code>try {
              $credentials = array(
                  'email'    =&gt; Input::get('email'),
                  'password' =&gt; Input::get('password'),
              );
  
              $user = Sentry::authenticate($credentials, false);
  
          }
          catch (Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\LoginRequiredException $e) {
              echo 'Login field is required.';
          }
          catch (Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\PasswordRequiredException $e) {
              echo 'Password field is required.';
          }
          catch (Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\WrongPasswordException $e) {
              echo 'Wrong password, try again.';
          }
          catch (Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\UserNotFoundException $e) {
              echo 'User was not found.';
          }
          catch (Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\UserNotActivatedException $e) {
              echo 'User is not activated.';
          }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to try to remove all the <code>try</code> and <code>catch</code> (I have my reason, it's multilevel authentication, I'm trying to shorten my code). So I tried this to check if whether authentication failed:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$credentials = array(
                  'email'    =&gt; Input::get('email'),
                  'password' =&gt; Input::get('password'),
              );
  
              $user = Sentry::authenticate($credentials, false);
  
              if (is_null($user)) {
                  /* error logic here */
              }
  else{
     /* login success! */
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The <code>is_null</code> won't work, the code won't continue. Any suggestions or solutions?</p>
  
  <p><em>EDIT</em></p>
  
  <p>Using Chrome's console, <code>var_dump($user)</code> did not show anything.</p>