he thirsting mule, which
has, in some countries, to strike with his hoof among the spines of
the cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, the few
drops of milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affectionate,
suffering natures came to Rome for comfort; but her scanty kindness
is only to be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness of
asceticism. The worldly, the audacious, escape easily; but these
pliant excitable temperaments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made
useful. The more dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their
performances, the more profit for their keepers. Men and women are
trained by torturing processes to deny their nature, and then they
are exhibited to bring grist to the mill--like birds and beasts
forced to postures and services against the laws of their being--like
those who must perform perilous feats on ropes or with lions, nightly
hazarding their lives to fill the pockets of a manager. The self-
devotedness of which Rome boasts so much is a self-devotion she has
always thus made the most of for herself. Calculating men who have
thought only of the interest of the priesthood, have known well how
best to stimulate and to display the spasmodic movements of a
brainsick disinterestedness. I have not the shadow of a doubt that,
once and again, some priest might have been seen, with cold gray eye,
endeavouring to do a stroke of diplomacy by means of the enthusiastic
Catherine, making the fancied ambassadress of Heaven in reality the
tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable virtues as these visionaries
may some of them have possessed cannot be fairly set down to the
credit of the Church, which has used them all for mercenary or
ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere with a morbid
character. Some of these mystics, floating down the great
ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the trees
carried away by the inundation of some mighty tropical river. They
drift along the stream, passive, lifeless, broken; yet they are
covered with gay verdure, the aquatic plants hang and twine about the
sodden timber and the draggled leaves, the trunk is a sailing garden
of flowers. But the adornment is that of Nature--it is the
decoration of another and a strange element: the roots are in the
air; the boughs which should be full of birds, are in the flood,
covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the
alligator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims f