* * * *

"Do you see that solemn figure, adorned with all the gold and
purple of his pontifical dress, ascending, with the thought, the
prayer of a multitude of ten thousand men, the triumphal steps in
the choir of St Denis? Do you see him still, above all that
kneeling mass, hovering as high as the vaulted roofs, his head
reaching the capitals, and lost among the winged heads of the
angels, whence he hurls his thunder? Well, it is the same man, this
terrible archangel himself, who presently descends for her, and
now, mild and gentle, goes yonder into that dark chapel, to listen
to her in the languid hours of the afternoon! Delightful hour of
tumultuous, but tender sensations! (Why does the heart palpitate so
strongly here?) How dark the church becomes! Yet it is not late.
The great rose-window over the portal glitters with the setting
sun. But it is quite another thing in the choir; dark shadows
envelope it, and beyond is obscurity. One thing astounds and almost
frightens us, however far we may be, which is the mysterious old
painted glass, at the farthest end of the church, on which the
design is no longer distinguishable, twinkling in the shade, like
an illegible magic scroll of unknown characters. The chapel is not
less dark on that account; you can no longer discern the ornaments
and delicate moulding entwined in the vaulted roof; the shadow
deepening blends and confounds the outlines. But, as if this chapel
were not dark enough, it contains, in a retired corner, a narrow
recess of dark oak, where that man, all emotion, and that trembling
woman, so close to each other, are whispering together about the
love of God."

The details of a priest's education for the confessional office are
necessarily deplorable. We blame not so much the men as the system. Yet
books, apparently, are continued among the preparations for this duty,
which might well be dispensed with as wholly unsuited to the age. We
believe that Sanchez was a man of holy life, though his purity, after
the analogy of one of Swift's paradoxes, left him a man of impure ideas;
and no one was ever forced by dire necessity to read his book without
disgust and dismay. It may be good for the students of medicine to
penetrate into every form in which bodily disease can show itself; but
the pathology of the mind thus hideously represented