age, prudent, cautious, and wise, of good person and
manners, but somewhat reserved and austere.

Lord James had the general direction of affairs on Mary's arrival,
and things went on very smoothly for a week; but then, on the first
Sunday after the landing, a very serious difficulty threatened to
occur. The Catholics have a certain celebration, called the mass, to
which they attach a very serious and solemn importance. When our
Savior gave the bread and the wine to his disciples at the Last
Supper he said of it, "This is my body, broken for you," and "This is
my blood, shed for you." The Catholics understand that these words
denote that the bread and wine did at that time, and that they do
now, whenever the communion service is celebrated by a priest duly
authorized, become, by a sort of miraculous transformation, the true
body and blood of Christ, and that the priest, in breaking the one
and pouring out the other, is really and truly renewing the great
sacrifice for sin made by Jesus Christ at his crucifixion. The mass,
therefore, in which the bread and the wine are so broken and poured
out, becomes, in their view, not a mere service of prayer and praise
to God, but a solemn _act_ of sacrifice. The spectators, or
assistants, as they call them, meaning all who are present on the
occasion, stand by, not merely to hear words of adoration, in which
they mentally join, as is the case in most Protestant forms of
worship, but to witness the _enactment of a deed_, and one of great
binding force and validity: a real and true sacrifice of Christ, made
anew, as an atonement for their sins. The bread, when consecrated,
and as they suppose, transmuted to the body of Christ, is held up to
view, or carried in a procession around the church, that all present
may bow before it and adore it as really being, though in the form of
bread, the wounded and broken body of the Lord.

Of course the celebration of the mass is invested, in the minds of
all conscientious Catholics, with the utmost solemnity and
importance. They stand silently by, with the deepest feelings of
reverence and awe, while the priest offers up for them, anew, the
great sacrifice for sin. They regard all Protestant worship, which
consists of mere exhortations to duty, hymns and prayers, as lifeless
and void. That which is to them the soul, the essence, and substance
of the whole, is wanting. On the other hand, the Protestants abhor
the sacrifice of the mass as gross su