gland will be buried in the ruins of Roman Catholicism if she does not exorcise the ecclesiastical spirit from her Bishops of Oxford and Ely. She can do nothing to improve the Continent of Europe with her feeble pinchbeck Romanism. Nor is the dogmatic school of Europe or America likely to accomplish any thing better. Laboring to establish the theory of salvation, not through moral and spiritual regeneration but through a blind faith in a mystic sacrifice, placing Jesus Christ in the place of Almighty God, and bringing this life and the life to come into sharp antagonism instead of practical harmony, they belong to the same chain of priests who mutter spells and aggrandize forms and dogmas and official claims and pretensions above the spirit of truth and the divine love and mercy and goodness. I heard in Naples an earnest and noble-hearted young Scotch minister—made of martyrs' stuff, I doubt not-who had come down full of faith and zeal to withstand the dreadful errors of Popery. His tenderness and pleading earnestness were most touching, his voice trembled with emotion, his face was pale with suppressed feeling. But his whole sermon was an effort to make his hearers believe that if they threw themselves unquestioningly into the arms of Jesus, and trusted in his sufficient sacrifice, all would be well with them. No doubt this dogma in his mind and life carried with it every thing pure, spiritual, devout and practically righteous. But what effect could it have on Roman Catholics? Do they not already cast their whole faith upon the Lord Jesus? Have they not loved and believed in him, until his "blessed mother" has been glorified into the Almighty's spouse, simply by the relation she bore the Son of God? What is the invocation of saints but a form of glorification of Him who gives peculiar holiness to those who have loved him best? What is the adoration of the mass, but a more vivid and perpetual worship of the God,

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Jesus Christ? Why should those who believe Jesus Christ to be God and the Maker of the world, have any difficulty in believing that he can and does perform the perpetual miracle of changing the bread and wine into his own body and blood? The dogmatic faith of Protestantism is still so largely of the same school and breed with Roman Catholic mysticism and worship that it is no proper antagonist or corrective of it. Whatever force it had, in virtue of its less superstitious character, it exhausted in the first fifty years of the Reformation, and has done nothing since. If there is to be any new Reformation in Catholic Europe it must come not from Protestant Churches, but from Protestant civilization and Protestant liberty and Protestant commerce and Protestant literature, all so far above and beyond Protestant theology. The spirit of the nineteenth century is coming in, and Europe, Catholic Europe, everywhere feels its reviving, liberating, moralizing and spiritualizing power! It is slowly breaking the bonds of dynastic and ecclesiastical power; destroying the terrible prestige of reigning houses and the divine right of princely families and aristocratic blood; it is releasing gradually the slumbering powers of thought, the suppressed manhood, the cowed imagination, the broken-spirited subjection to habitual wrong, the stupid acquiescence in old and fixed abuses under which the Roman Catholic nations have lived for fourteen hundred years.

The example of America is wonderfully operative. Every town in Europe has a son in the New World, whose reports of our American life touch the dull strings of the peasants' groveling hearts, and bring out some notes of hope or some half-discordant thrills of aspiration. I have heard America forming the theme of the Italian soldiers' talk at their macaroni kettle, and could we penetrate the life of Europe in its lowest strata, I believe the freedom and equality and pros

ence.

perity of the common people in our country would be found to be the chief moving cause to any endeavors they make to improve their own condition, as it is the best argument they have for the possibility of political and religious independMeanwhile European backwardness, superstition, and abuse of human nature retards American thought, hampers the American Church, and stops the real spiritual development of Christianity on the soil of the New World. Slavery and its exigencies falsified American theology for fifty years, and influenced the dogmatic and critical teachings of Princeton and Andover, and, with exceptions, of the whole Northern pulpit. Roman Catholicism, and its half-breed descendants in Europe, modifies and deforms American theology today. The breaking up of the English Establishment depends upon the parting of the Roman cable, which will make a common wreck of the Roman and the Anglo-Catholic Churches. The wreck of the English Establishment will loosen the American Churches from their imitative and scholastic superstitions. Christianity will then have its turn as a purely moral and spiritual religion, having historic reality and divine authority and sacred records to rest upon, but appealing to no unreasoned fears and superstitious hopes for its progress a religion which will show itself friendly to the world which God made, and respectful to the humanity he fashioned in his own image and placed upon it; a religion in which moral and spiritual principles shall be seen to be the sources of all true peace and happiness on earth, and the pledges, because the conditions, of all joy and all blessedness in the life beyond the grave.

January 1, 1868.

I have just returned from the pontifical mass in the Sistine Chapel. At 10 A.M. the Swiss Guards, in their uniforms

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of black and orange, slashed with red, filed into the chapel, followed by the hundred or two of strangers who had dressed themselves, the ladies in black, with black veils on their heads, the gentlemen in black dress suits, according to the rigid etiquette of these grand ceremonial occasions. The cardinals came in one by one, each followed by his attendant priest, knelt before the altar and took their seat on a raised dais, common to all. As each came in, all the seated cardinals rose until the new-comer had taken his place. They were dressed in long red cloaks with enormous trains, over white priests' smocks, with red stockings, white fur capes, and a skull-cap of red. It was no easy matter for them to manage their robes in all the prostrations, salutes and movements they passed through in the course of the service. At eleven o'clock a procession of other cardinals, bishops and priests ushered the Pope into the chapel. He took his place upon his throne on the left hand of the altar. He was dressed in white satin robes embroidered with gold, and wore a white skull-cap. He looks now about seventy-three years old. His face is mild, patient and benignant, and he enters into all Church ceremonies with marked earnestness and simplicity of bearing. His person is large and commanding, his head full and well-shaped, and he looks more as Edward Everett did in the closing years of his life than any other person I can now think of. He was attended by two cardinals, one on the right and another on the left, who were raised above the others. One looked as Antonelli ought to, a man with a hooked nose and a firm jaw, fitted to uphold the Pope's temporal government in its most imperiled hour. The service was chiefly conducted by a cardinal-bishop, who had a grand voice and could be heard by all the assembly. Another cardinal sat on the platform of red cloth at the foot of the Pope's throne, who had special

functions to perform, such as swinging the censer at his Holiness at certain intervals. The Armenian Patriarch held the candle whenever the Pope read any small portion of the service. His book was meanwhile supported by another grandee of the Church, and every thing, to the holding of his skirts, seemed assigned in most careful gradation to those having the precise claim to the privilege. Nothing could exceed the punctiliousness and etiquette observed. I have often been amazed at the knowledge of their several parts displayed by performers in the complicated arrangements of secular and stage spectacles, but the memory and method observed in a pontifical mass exceeds every other achievement in the way of conquering ceremonial complexity. I will not attempt to describe the order of the ceremony, which, except in splendor and the presence of the embodied dignity of the Roman Church, was like any other high mass. The famous choir of the Sistine Chapel had much the largest part of the work to do, and they did it with a precision and copiousness and magnificence of musical effect which entitles them to their superlative reputation. The "Gloria" exceeded in exquisiteness of harmony, in light and shade, in fullness of sound, and in exactness of rendering any thing in the shape of unaccompanied male voices I ever heard..

At the moment when the sacred elements were undergoing their imaginary transubstantiation, the scene was truly impressive. A profound silence reigned while Pope, cardinals, bishops and the whole assembly knelt and waited as if some awful event were in suspense. Certainly the Catholic Church is true to its theories. Having adopted the incredible dogma of Transubstantiation, it honors it with logical reverence. Every thing hinges, as well it may, on this tremendous assumption. It is the presence of the consecrated mass that hallows the altar. "Put on your hat," said one of the