is unfortunately too long to quote.

It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient
empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when
one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of
brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling,
and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you,
and comes, it may be, from a "home" upon a veldt or prairie with one
sitting-room and a Bible on its centre-table. It pauperizes the
monarchical imagination!

The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously
impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in
spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present
day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable
ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and
shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of
honey, is so indulgent in its multiform appeals to human nature, that
Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse
physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind
incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated
beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if
taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are
childish in the pleasing sense of "childlike"--innocent and amiable,
and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped
condition of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the
contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods.
He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the
Catholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as
morose as if he were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile.
The two will never understand each other--their centres of emotional
energy are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature's
intricacies are always in need of a mutual interpreter.[305] So much
for the aesthetic diversities in the religious consciousness.

[305] Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the "meek lover
of the good," alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own
sakes, with the elaborate "business" that goes on in Catholic devotion,
and carries with it the social excitement of all more complex
businesses. An essentially worldly-minded Catholic woman can become a
visitor of the s