a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What Science brings so
much out of so little? out of what poor elements does some great
master in it create his new world!

"Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere
ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day,
without reality, without meaning? We may do so; and then, perhaps,
we shall also account theology to be a matter of words; yet, as
there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who
feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the wonderful
creation of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many
men the very names which the Science employs are utterly
incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be
fanciful or trifling, to speak of the views which it opens upon us
to be childish extravagance; yet is it possible that that
inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so
simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic,
should be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes?

"Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen
emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful
impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by
what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in
itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from
some higher sphere, they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in
the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our home; they
are the voice of angels or the magnificat of Saints, or the living
laws of Divine Governance, or the Divinic attributes; something
are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we
cannot utter,--though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise
distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them."

Of quite another order is the Cardinal's description of a gentleman.
Here there is no flight of poetical imagination, but a manifestation of
felicitous intuition and penetrating insight as rare as it is convincing,
and the generous wide vision of a man of the world, undimmed by the
faintest trace of prejudice:--

"Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say
he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both
refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in