She climbed the hundred steps of the Ara Coeli; she trod the broad, silent nave of St.John Lateran; she stood in the Pantheon, under the round opening in the dome, through which the blue sunny sky still gazes down, as it used to gaze when there were Roman deities in the antique niches.

She went into every church that rose before her, but not now to wonder at its magnificence, when she hardly noticed more than if it had been the pine-built interior of a New England meeting-house.
She went--and it was a dangerous errand--to observe how closely and comfortingly the popish faith applied itself to all human occasions.

It was impossible to doubt that multitudes of people found their spiritual advantage in it, who would find none at all in our own formless mode of worship; which, besides, so far as the sympathy of prayerful souls is concerned, can be enjoyed only at stated and too unfrequent periods.

But here, whenever the hunger for divine nutriment came upon the soul, it could on the instant be appeased.

At one or another altar, the incense was forever ascending; the mass always being performed, and carrying upward with it the devotion of such as had not words for their own prayer.