fact. In protestant
countries she may insert the name of God at the end of her prayers; but
in popish countries she does not deem it needful to observe this
formality. The name of Christ and of God rarely occurs in her popular
formulas. In the Duomo of Bologna, the only god supplicated,--the only
god known,--is San Petronio. The tendency of the worship of the Church
of Rome is to efface God from the knowledge and the love of her members.
And so completely has this result been realized, that, as one said, "You
might steal God from them without their knowing it." Indeed, that "Great
and Dreadful Name" might be blotted out from the few prayers of that
Church in which it is still retained, and its worship would go on as
before. What possible change would take place in the Duomo of San
Petronio at Bologna, and in thousands of other churches in Italy,
though Rome was to decree in _words_, as she does in _deeds_, that
"_there is no God_?"

On the second day of my stay at Bologna I ascended the fine hill on the
north of the city. A noble pillared arcade of marble, three miles in
length, leads up to the summit. At every twelve yards or so is an
alcove, with a florid painting of some saint; and at each station sits a
poor old woman, who begs an alms of you, in the name of the saint
beneath whose picture she spins her thread,--her own thread being nearly
ended. There met me here a regiment of little priests, of about an
hundred in number, none of whom seemed more than ten years of age, and
all of whom wore shoes with buckles, silk stockings, breeches, a loose
flowing robe, a white-edged stock, and shovel hat,--in short, miniature
priests in dress, in figure, and in everything save their greater
sportiveness. On the summit is a magnificent church, containing one of
those black madonnas ascribed to Luke, and said to have been brought
hither by a hermit from Constantinople in the twelfth century. Be this
as it may, the black image serves the Bolognese for an occasion of an
annual festival, kept with fully as much hilarity as devotion.

From the summit one looks far and wide over Italy. Below is spread out
the plain of Lombardy, level as the sea, and as thickly studded with
white villas as the heavens with stars. On the north, the cities of
Mantua and Verona, and numerous other towns and villages, are visible.
On the east, the towers and cathedral roofs of Ferrara are seen rising
above the woods that cover the plain; and the view is