amused
with architecture, painting, carving, sweet odours, and the most
wondrous music that has ever cheated man, even while he offers up his
easy adorations, and departs, equally complacent at the choral remedies
as at the priestly absolution; while, for those good few, the truly
pious and enlightened children of Rome, who mourn the corruptions of
their church, and explain away, with trembling tongue, her obvious
errors and idolatries, for these the wily scheme, so probable, devised
an undoubted mass of truth to be left among the rubbish. True doctrines,
justly held by true martyrs and true saints, holy men of God who have
died in that communion; ordinances and an existence which creep up,
(heedless of corruption though,) step by step, through past antiquity,
to the very feet of the Founder; keen casuists, competent to prove any
point of conscience or objection, and that indisputably, for they climax
all by the high authority of Popes and councils that cannot be deceived:
pious treatises and manuals, verily of flaming heat, for they mingle the
yearnings of a constrained celibacy with the fervencies of worship and
the cravings after God. Yes, there is meat here for every human mouth;
only that, alas for men! the meat is that which perisheth, and not
endureth unto everlasting life. Rome, thou wert sagely schemed; and if
Lucifer devised thee not for the various appetencies of poor,
deceivable, Catholic Man, verily it were pity, for thou art worthy of
his handiwork. All things to all men, in any sense but the right,
signifies nothing to anybody: in the sense of falsehoods, take the
former for thy motto; in that of single truth, in its intensity, the
latter.

Let not then the accident--the probable accident--of the Italian
superstition place any hindrance in the way of one whose mind is all at
sea because of its existence. What, O man with a soul, is all the world
else to thee? Christianity, whatever be its broad way of pretences, is
but in reality a narrow path: be satisfied with the day of small things,
stagger not at the inconsistencies, conflicting words, and hateful
strifes of those who say they are Christians, but "are not, but are of
the synagogue of Satan." Judge truth, neither by her foes nor by her
friends but by herself. There was one who said (and I never heard that
any writer, from Julian to Hobbes, ever disputed his human truth or
wisdom) "Needs must that offences come; but wo be to that man by whom
the offen