urch wished to make things easier for men holding the opinions held by
the late Mr. Darwin, or by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Professor Huxley? How
can those who accept evolution with any thoroughness accept such
doctrines as the Incarnation or the Redemption with any but a
quasi-allegorical and poetical interpretation? Can we conceivably accept
these doctrines in the literal sense in which the Church advances them?
And can the leaders of the Church be blind to the resistlessness of the
current that has set against those literal interpretations which she
seems to hug more and more closely the more religious life is awakened at
all? The clergyman is wanted as supplementing the doctor and the lawyer
in all civilised communities; these three keep watch on one another, and
prevent one another from becoming too powerful. I, who distrust the
_doctrinaire_ in science even more than the _doctrinaire_ in religion,
should view with dismay the abolition of the Church of England, as
knowing that a blatant bastard science would instantly step into her
shoes; but if some such deplorable consummation is to be avoided in
England, it can only be through more evident leaning on the part of our
clergy to such an interpretation of the Sacred History as the presence of
a black and white Madonna almost side by side at Oropa appears to
suggest.

I fear that in these last paragraphs I may have trenched on dangerous
ground, but it is not possible to go to such places as Oropa without
asking oneself what they mean and involve. As for the average Italian
pilgrims, they do not appear to give the matter so much as a thought.
They love Oropa, and flock to it in thousands during the summer; the
President of the Administration assured me that they lodged, after a
fashion, as many as ten thousand pilgrims on the 15th of last August. It
is astonishing how living the statues are to these people, and how the
wicked are upbraided and the good applauded. At Varallo, since I took
the photographs I published in my book "Ex Voto," an angry pilgrim has
smashed the nose of the dwarf in Tabachetti's Journey to Calvary, for no
other reason than inability to restrain his indignation against one who
was helping to inflict pain on Christ. It is the real hair and the
painting up to nature that does this. Here at Oropa I found a paper on
the floor of the _Sposalizio_ Chapel, which ran as follows:--

"By the grace of God and the will of the administrative chapter o