nother, a present from a lady of
rank, is said to have cost three thousand dollars. Whatever may be
thought of the rightfulness of this expenditure, turning upon the old
question as to which the alabaster box of ointment and the ordained
costliness of the Jewish ritual "must give us pause," it cannot be said
of the Jesuits that they live in cedar, while the ark of God rests in
curtains; for the actual life of the streets hardly presents any greater
contrast, than that between the sumptuousness of their apparel at the
altar, and the coarseness and cheapness of their ordinary dress, the
bareness of their rooms, and the apparent severity of their life.

The Cubans have a childish taste for excessive decoration. Their altars
look like toyshops. A priest, not a Cuban, told me that he went to the
high altar of the cathedral once, on a Christmas day, to officiate, and
when his eye fell on the childish and almost profane attempts at
symbolism--a kind of doll millinery, if he had not got so far that he
could not retire without scandal, he would have left the duties of the
day to others. At the Belen there is less of this; but the Jesuits find
or think it necessary to conform a good deal to the popular taste.

In the sacristy, near the side altar, is a distressing image of the
Virgin, not in youth, but the mother of the mature man, with a sword
pierced through her heart--referring to the figurative prediction "a
sword shall pierce through thine own soul also." The handle and a part
of the blade remain without, while the marks of the deep wound are seen,
and the countenance expresses the sorest agony of mind and body. It is
painful, and beyond all legitimate scope of art, and haunts one, like a
vision of actual misery. It is almost the only thing in the church of
which I have brought away a distinct image in my memory.

A strange, eventful history is that of the Society of Jesus! Ignatius
Loyola, a soldier and noble of Spain, renouncing arms and knighthood,
hangs his trophies of war upon the altar of Monserrate. After intense
studies and barefoot pilgrimages, persecuted by religious orders whose
excesses he sought to restrain, and frowned upon by the Inquisition, he
organizes, with Xavier and Faber, at Montmartre, a society of three.
From this small beginning, spreading upwards and outwards, it
overshadows the earth. Now, at the top of success, it is supposed to
control half Christendom. Now, his order proscribed by State and Chu