nspire
to gabble it over as if it mattered not a jot who attended to it, or
even understood it? Speak, man, speak," he added, gently shaking him by
the shoulder.

"These are such difficult questions," answered Willis; "must I speak?
Such difficult questions," he continued, rising into a more animated
manner, and kindling as he went on; "I mean, people view them so
differently: it is so difficult to convey to one person the idea of
another. The idea of worship is different in the Catholic Church from
the idea of it in your Church; for, in truth, the _religions_ are
different. Don't deceive yourself, my dear Bateman," he said tenderly,
"it is not that ours is your religion carried a little farther,--a
little too far, as you would say. No, they differ in kind, not in
degree; ours is one religion, yours another. And when the time comes,
and come it will, for you, alien as you are now, to submit yourself to
the gracious yoke of Christ, then, my dearest Bateman, it will be
_faith_ which will enable you to bear the ways and usages of Catholics,
which else might perhaps startle you. Else, the habits of years, the
associations in your mind of a certain outward behaviour with real
inward acts of devotion, might embarrass you, when you had to conform
yourself to other habits, and to create for yourself other associations.
But this faith, of which I speak, the great gift of God, will enable you
in that day to overcome yourself, and to submit, as your judgment, your
will, your reason, your affections, so your tastes and likings, to the
rule and usage of the Church. Ah, that faith should be necessary in such
a matter, and that what is so natural and becoming under the
circumstances, should have need of an explanation! I declare, to me," he
said, and he clasped his hands on his knees, and looked forward as if
soliloquizing, "to me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so
thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could
attend Masses for ever, and not be tired. It is not a mere form of
words,--it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth.
It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the
evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and
blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful
event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of
the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are
not mere addre