efore you will ere long be turned into
mummies. However, you console yourselves for the anticipated
metamorphosis by the reflection that the salvation of the monklings is
assured.

All the Pope's subjects would be sure of getting to Heaven if they
could all enter the cloisters; but then the world would come to an end
too soon. The Pope does his best to bring them near this state of
monastic and ecclesiastical perfection. Students are dressed like
priests, and corpses also are arrayed in a sort of religious costume.
The Brethren of the Christian Doctrine were thought dangerous because
they dressed their little boys in caps, tunics, and belts; so the Pope
forbade them to go on teaching young Rome. The Bolognese (beyond the
Apennines) founded by subscription asylums under the direction of lay
female teachers. The clergy make most praiseworthy efforts to reform
such an abuse.

There is not a law, not a regulation, not a deed nor a word of the
higher powers, which does not tend to the edification of the people,
and to urge them on heavenward.

Enter this church. A monk is preaching with fierce gesticulations. He
is not in the pulpit, but he stands about twenty paces from it, on a
plank hastily flung across trestles. Don't be afraid of his treating a
question of temporal ethics after the fashion of our worldly
preachers. He is dogmatically and furiously descanting on the
Immaculate Conception, on fasting in Lent, on avoiding meat of a
Friday, on the doctrine of the Trinity, on the special nature of
hell-fire.

"Bethink you, my brethren, that if terrestrial fire, the
fire created by God for your daily wants and your general
use, can cause you such acute pain at the least contact with
your flesh, how much more fierce and terrible must be that
flame of hell-fire which ever devours without consuming
those who ... etc. etc."

I spare you the rest.

Our sacred orators for the most part confine themselves to preaching
on such subjects as fidelity, to wives; probity, to men; obedience, to
children. They descend to a level with a lay congregation, and
endeavour to sow, each according to his powers, a little virtue on
earth. Verily, Roman eloquence cares very much for virtue! It is
greatly troubled about the things of earth! It takes the people by the
shoulders and forces them into the paths of devotion, which lead
straight to Heaven. And it does its duty, according to the teachings
of the Church