l ritual and ceremonial. I looked at it.

Many people--men and women--no doubt far my superiors in a thousand
ways, have felt this display impressive, have declared that though
their Reason protested, their Imagination was subjugated. I cannot say
the same. Neither full procession, nor high mass, nor swarming tapers,
nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial
jewellery, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as
tawdry, not grand; as grossly material, not poetically spiritual.

This I did not tell Pere Silas; he was old, he looked venerable:
through every abortive experiment, under every repeated disappointment,
he remained personally kind to me, and I felt tender of hurting his
feelings. But on the evening of a certain day when, from the balcony of
a great house, I had been made to witness a huge mingled procession of
the church and the army--priests with relics, and soldiers with
weapons, an obese and aged archbishop, habited in cambric and lace,
looking strangely like a grey daw in bird-of-paradise plumage, and a
band of young girls fantastically robed and garlanded--_then_ I spoke
my mind to M. Paul.

"I did not like it," I told him; "I did not respect such ceremonies; I
wished to see no more."

And having relieved my conscience by this declaration, I was able to go
on, and, speaking more currently and clearly than my wont, to show him
that I had a mind to keep to my reformed creed; the more I saw of
Popery the closer I clung to Protestantism; doubtless there were errors
in every church, but I now perceived by contrast how severely pure was
my own, compared with her whose painted and meretricious face had been
unveiled for my admiration. I told him how we kept fewer forms between
us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of
mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due observance. I told him I
could not look on flowers and tinsel, on wax-lights and embroidery, at
such times and under such circumstances as should be devoted to lifting
the secret vision to Him whose home is Infinity, and His
being--Eternity. That when I thought of sin and sorrow, of earthly
corruption, mortal depravity, weighty temporal woe--I could not care
for chanting priests or mumming officials; that when the pains of
existence and the terrors of dissolution pressed before me--when the
mighty hope and measureless doubt of the future arose in view--_then_,
even the scientific strain, o