ed to the
present head of the Borromean family, and entitled, _A Discourse on the
Humility of Jesus Christ, and of St Charles Borromeo_."

I came round, and stood in front of the high altar. It towers to a great
height, looking like the tall mast of a ship; and, could any supposable
influence throw the marble floor on which it rests into billows, it
might ride safely on their tops, beneath the stone roof of the
Cathedral. A priest was saying mass, and some half-dozen of persons on
the wooden benches before the chancel were joining in the service. It
was a cold affair; and the vastness of the building but tended to throw
an air of insignificance over it. The languid faces of the priest and
his diminutive congregation brought vividly to my recollection the crowd
of animated countenances I had seen outside the same building, around
Punch, the day before. The devotion before me was a dead, not a living
thing. It had been dead before the foundations of this august temple
were laid. But it loved to revisit "the glimpses" of these tapers, and
to grimace and mutter amid these shadowy aisles. To nothing could I
compare it but to the skeleton in the chapel beneath, that lay rotting
in a shroud of gorgeous robes. It was as much a corpse as that skeleton,
and, like it too, it bore a shroud of purple and scarlet, and fine linen
and gold, which concealed only in part its ghastliness. Were Ambrose to
come back, he would once more close his Cathedral gates, but this time
in the face of the priests.

"Without controversy," says the apostle, "great is the mystery of
godliness. God was manifest in the flesh." "Without controversy, great
is the mystery of" iniquity. "God was manifest in the" mass. These are
the two INCARNATIONS--the two MYSTERIES. They stand confronting one
another. Romish writers style the mass emphatically "the mystery;" and
as that dogma is a capital one in their system, it follows that their
Church has _mystery_ written on her forehead, as plainly as John saw it
on that of the woman in the Apocalypse. But farther, what is the
principle of the mass? Is it not that Christ is again offered in
sacrifice, and that the pain he endures in being so propitiates God in
your behalf? Is not, then, the area of Europe that is covered with
masses "_the place where our Lord was crucified_?"

The stream can never rise higher than its source; and so is it with
worship. That worship that cometh of man cannot, in the nature of
things,