But on the other hand, I am bound to urge in the Pope’s behalf that the colleges are numerous, well endowed, and provided with ample means for turning out mediocre priests.  The monasteries devote themselves to the education of little monks.  They are taught from an early age to hold a wax taper, wear a frock, cast down their eyes, and chant in Latin.  If you wish to admire the foresight of the Church, you should see the procession of Corpus Christi day.  All the convents walk in line one after the other, and each has its live nursery of little shavelings.  Their bright Italian eyes, sparkling with intelligence, and their handsome open countenances, form a curious contrast with the stolid and hypocritical masks worn by their superiors.  At one glance you behold the opening flowers and the ripe fruit of religion,—­the present and the future.  You think within yourselves that, in default of a miracle, the cherubs before you will ere long be turned into mummies.  However, you console yourselves for the anticipated metamorphosis by the reflection that the salvation of the monklings is assured.

All the Pope’s subjects would be sure of getting to Heaven if they could all enter the cloisters; but then the world would come to an end too soon.  The Pope does his best to bring them near this state of monastic and ecclesiastical perfection.  Students are dressed like priests, and corpses also are arrayed in a sort of religious costume.  The Brethren of the Christian Doctrine were thought dangerous because they dressed their little boys in caps, tunics, and belts; so the Pope forbade them to go on teaching young Rome.  The Bolognese (beyond the Apennines) founded by subscription asylums under the direction of lay female teachers.  The clergy make most praiseworthy efforts to reform such an abuse.

There is not a law, not a regulation, not a deed nor a word of the higher powers, which does not tend to the edification of the people, and to urge them on heavenward.

Enter this church.  A monk is preaching with fierce gesticulations.  He is not in the pulpit, but he stands about twenty paces from it, on a plank hastily flung across trestles.  Don’t be afraid of his treating a question of temporal ethics after the fashion of our worldly preachers.  He is dogmatically and furiously descanting on the Immaculate Conception, on fasting in Lent, on avoiding meat of a Friday, on the doctrine of the Trinity, on the special nature of hell-fire.

“Bethink you, my brethren, that if terrestrial fire, the fire created by God for your daily wants and your general use, can cause you such acute pain at the least contact with your flesh, how much more fierce and terrible must be that flame of hell-fire which ever devours without consuming those who ... etc. etc.”

I spare you the rest.