802 On Priests in general, and []No\'. 



the pictorial splendors of its worship. He either would not, or could 

 not, understand my distinction. He insisted upon the uniformity of his 

 church, and could not conceive why English Catholics were not wretched 

 and deluded enough to do public penance, and undertake painful 

 journeys of pilgrimage. He overlooked the effects of climate, asso- 

 ciation, and local obligations. To him the whole Catholic world sliould 

 be as one besotted Spain, and all the people Spaniards. He alike depre- 

 cated the want of respect that was manifested towards him : there was 

 no reverence as he approached, not that he desired, but that he expected 

 it : there were no offerings of remembrance, no reliquary endowments, 

 no bequests, no images of costly materials ; all was plain, rude, and 

 republican (a form of government, which, beyond all others, is detestable 

 in the eyes of the thorough Catholic). I urged upon him that this 

 was a country where industry and regularity were substituted for idle- 

 ness and confusion : that the English Catholics were a part and parcel 

 of the great mass that gave vitality to the useful arts, and the admirable 

 system that pervaded all ranks ; but he scowled at my mechanical 

 defence, and said that the honour due to God and his messengers should 

 not be foi-gotten for the sake of selfish employments and filthy lucre. 

 His fiiiiure in the main views that led him to make an experiment upon the 

 sympathies of our native papists, confirmed all his previous grounds of 

 hatred to the name of freedom, and its type — Great Britain. He left our 

 shores execrating and despising us ; and was more than ever convinced 

 that liberty and England were the chief barriers to the march of 

 Catholicity. I have since learned that he turned this accession of pre- 

 judice to some account, and preached out the venom of his animosity in 

 some of the principal churches of Spain, exaggerating, of course, as dis- 

 appointed men do, all the objectionable points. For aught I know, even 

 the illustrious Ferdinand has profited by his lessons. 



But there was in France a body of the Catholic clergy totally different 

 in their habits and modes of thinking from that portion of which the 

 Spanish monk was an exemplar : I mean the doctors of the Sorbonne. 

 Liberal, learned, and accomplished, in them the worst part of their 

 creed lost its grossness, and the better shone out in a pure light. They 

 endeavoured to assuage the bitterness of doctrines which they could 

 neither disavow nor defend ; and they obtained from Protestant Europe 

 the universal expression of respect. Their erudition was not confined to 

 the fathers of the church ; they cultivated the liberal sciences and belles- 

 lettres, and embraced, in the course of their studies, the whole range of 

 moral and polite literature. The appearance of one of these fine old 

 gentlemen of the ancien regime was an object almost worthy of the earlier 

 age, when the Vaudois from their vallies sent the consecrated banner of 

 regeneration, stained vith the heart's blood of thousands, over the plains 

 of Germany and Austria. It was not in externals, nor in the extent of 

 their knowledge merely, that the doctors of the Sorbonne were elevated 

 above the vulgar level of their grasping order. They maintained, it is 

 true, the doctrines of popery ; but they broke down their rigour to a 

 standard that adapted them to a freer condition of society. If they 

 believed in the Real Presence, it was rather as a figvire or illustration than 

 as a positive physical miracle ; — -not that they contravened the sophistry, 

 but that they were not so indiscreet as to agitate it. They permitted 

 mysteries to remain ; for, wanting power to dissolve them, they were 

 not bigotted enough to advocate any dogma that involved a contradic- 



