laim on human gratitude. What Saint Lewis of
France discerned, and found so irresistibly touching, across the
dimness of many centuries, as a painful thing done for love of him by
one he had never seen, was to them almost as a thing of yesterday; and
their hearts were whole with it. It had the force, among their
interests, of an almost recent event in the career of one whom their
fathers' fathers might have known. From memories so sublime, yet so
close at hand, had the narrative descended in which these acts of
worship centered; though again the names of some more recently dead
were mingled in it. And it seemed as if the very dead were aware; to
be stirring beneath the slabs of the sepulchres which lay so near, that
they might associate themselves to this enthusiasm--to this exalted
worship of Jesus.

One by one, at last, the faithful approach to receive from the chief
minister morsels of the great, white, wheaten cake, he had taken into
his hands--Perducat vos ad vitam aeternam! he prays, half-silently, as
they depart again, after [140] discreet embraces. The Eucharist of
those early days was, even more entirely than at any later or happier
time, an act of thanksgiving; and while the remnants of the feast are
borne away for the reception of the sick, the sustained gladness of the
rite reaches its highest point in the singing of a hymn: a hymn like
the spontaneous product of two opposed militant companies, contending
accordantly together, heightening, accumulating, their witness,
provoking one another's worship, in a kind of sacred rivalry.

Ite! Missa est!--cried the young deacons: and Marius departed from
that strange scene along with the rest. What was it?--Was it this made
the way of Cornelius so pleasant through the world? As for Marius
himself,--the natural soul of worship in him had at last been satisfied
as never before. He felt, as he left that place, that he must
hereafter experience often a longing memory, a kind of thirst, for all
this, over again. And it seemed moreover to define what he must
require of the powers, whatsoever they might be, that had brought him
into the world at all, to make him not unhappy in it.

NOTES

139. *Psalm xxii.22-31.

CHAPTER XXIV: A CONVERSATION NOT IMAGINARY

[141] IN cheerfulness is the success of our studies, says Pliny--studia
hilaritate proveniunt. It was still the habit of Marius, encouraged by
his experience that sleep is not only a sedative but the