My ideas and dreams about catholic advancement were thus brought to a calamitous end.  This church to which I had come was one in high credit for much private and public devotion; but, alas!  I found what I might easily have expected, that without spiritual vitality everything must be dry and dead!  Dry and dead indeed it was.  The conversation of these supposed ascetics was for the most part secular, and at the highest only ecclesiastical.  Their worship, on which a great amount of pains and cost was bestowed, was but a form carefully prepared and carefully executed, as if critics were present; yet it did not, and could not, rise to spirituality.  A lady presided at the organ, and had the teaching and training of the choir.  Much of her own personal and religious character were imparted to the performances, which in tone and manner were admirable and precise.  She made the boys understand the sense of the words they sang, till I have seen them even in tears during the singing.  The “chaste old verger” (as our reporter called him), who headed the procession at least four times a day, up and down the church, was a very important and successful part of the machinery, and from him, up to the highest official, everything was carried out with exact precision.

But oh, how unsatisfying and disappointing it was!—­to a degree which I was ashamed to own!  How could I be so foolish, to give up a living, where there was vitality, though it was rough, for a superficial and artificial semblance of religion?  In the book of Ecclesiastes we read, that “a living dog is better than a dead lion;” and though I had often quoted this saying, I never felt the truth of it so deeply as now.  The dead lion and the dead elephant are quite immovable things for a live dog to bark at or fret about.  It was a hard and trying time to me in that place.  I could not see my way, or understand at all what was the Lord’s will towards me.  While in this state of mind I had a vivid dream.  I thought that the ornamental iron grating, which was for ventilating the space under the floor of the church, was all glowing with fire, as if a great furnace were raging there.  I tried to cry “Fire!” but could not.  Then I ran into the church, and saw it full of people reverently absorbed in their devotions.  I tried again to give the alarm, and cry “Fire! fire!” but I could not utter a sound.  When I looked up, I saw thin, long, waving strings of fire coming up among the people through the joints of the floor.  I called attention to this, but no one else could see it.  Then I became frantic in my gesticulation, and at last was able to tell some of the congregation of the great fire which was under them; but they looked at one another, smiling, and told me to go about my business—­that I was mad!  I woke out of my troubled sleep in a very agitated and perturbed state.  Since that, whenever I have seen or heard of churches, where Church and Sacraments are preached, instead of Christ, as the one way of salvation, I long to warn the people of the fire raging underneath, and to show them the way of the Lord more perfectly.