y had placed this flesh
in certain hymns, after the Trinity, as a fourth person. Priests,
women, and young girls have all since then vied with one another in
this devotion. I have before me a manual, much used in country places,
in which they teach the persons of their community, who pray for one
another, how they join hearts, and how these hearts, once united,
"ought to desire to enter into the opening of the heart of Jesus, and
be incessantly sinking into that amorous wound."

The brotherhood, in their manuals, have occasionally found it gallant
to put the heart of Mary above that of Jesus (see that of Nantes,
1769). In their engravings she is generally younger than her Son,
being, for instance, about twenty, whereas he is thirty years old, so
that, at first sight, He seems to be rather her husband or lover than
her Son.

This very year I saw at Rouen, in the Church of St. Ouen, in the Chapel
of the _Sacred Heart_, a pen-and-ink drawing, by young ladies, having
the written approbation of the ecclesiastical authorities, in which
Jesus is represented on His knees before the Virgin, who is also
kneeling.

The most violent satire against the Jesuits is what they have made
themselves--their art, the pictures and statues they have inspired.
They are at once characterised by the severe sentence of Poussin, whose
Christ did not appear to them pretty enough: "We cannot imagine a
Christ with His head on one side, or like Father Donillet's." Yet
Poussin saw the best days of the Jesuit art: what would he have said if
he had seen what followed? all that decrepid coquetry that thinks it
smiles whilst it grimaces, those ridiculous glances, dying eyes, and
such like deformities. The worst is, they who think only of the flesh
know no longer how to represent it. As the thought grows more and more
material and insipid, the form becomes defaced, degraded from picture
to picture, ignoble, foppish, affected, heavy, dull--that is to say,
shapeless.[2]

We may judge of men by the art they inspire; and I confess it is no
easy task to augur favourably of the souls of those who inspire this
art, and recommend these engravings, hanging them up in their churches
and distributing them by thousands and millions. Such taste is an
ominous sign. Many immoral people still possess a sentiment of
elegance. But willingly to take to the ignoble and false discovers a
sad degradation of the soul.

An undeniable truth is here made manifest; wh