e. In these the important questions of the missionary world
are discussed, reports examined, new missions proposed, new missionaries
appointed, new bishoprics founded "among the heathen," and all these
complicated interests taken into impartial consideration.

For here, at least, there is little room for heart-burnings and
jealousies. It is of equal importance to all that the conquests of the
Church should be extended to the utmost limits of the earth, the heathen
converted, and heretics won back to the fold. While John Eliot was
translating the Bible into a language which no one has been left to
read, and his Puritan brethren were hanging and shooting the Indians
whom they had neither the patience to win by their teaching nor the
charity to enlighten by their example, Indians from the true Indies were
preparing themselves in the halls of the Propaganda to carry the healing
promises of the gospel to the fathers and mothers who had watched over
their heathen infancy. In the record of the great things that Rome has
done, there is nothing greater than the foundation of the
Propaganda,--no conception so worthy of a steadfast faith, or more in
harmony with the spirit of the Saviour of mankind. To borrow the
helpless child, and restore him a helpful man,--to enlist the sympathies
of birth, and secure for themselves the eloquence of natural
affection,--to overleap the barriers of race and elude the sensitiveness
of national pride by putting the doctrines they sought to diffuse into
mouths which, untainted by repulsive accents, could enforce new truths
by well-known images and familiar illustrations,--was like laying anew
the foundations of the Capitol, and consecrating that spirit of worldly
wisdom wherein ancient Rome was never found wanting by that spirit of
Christian philanthropy which modern Rome has always claimed as her
peculiar distinction.

But alas that a twenty-minutes' walk should take us from the Piazza di
Spagna to the Via di Sant' Uffizio!

The other ecclesiastical functions of government are performed in a
similar way: one congregation superintending the churches of Rome and
its district, under the title of _Visita Apostolica_; one, the
ceremonies of the Church; one, ecclesiastical immunities; one, sacred
rites; one, indulgences and relies. Questions relative to bishops,
bishoprics, and the regular orders are intrusted to four congregations,
under different and appropriate names. St. Peter's has a special
con