mind
between truth and fiction--Familiar examples--Money-contributions for
adornment of images--Belief that saints can cure certain complaints--List
of these--Saint Anthony of Padua's miracles--The fete of _San Anton
Abad_--Virgin Mary, and her innumerable advocations--A list of
several--The Rosary--Statues of the Virgin--Immense value of their
wardrobes and trinkets--The most ugly of those statues excite most
devotion--Virgin of Zaragoza--The heart of Mary--Month of Mary
(May)--Kissing images--Anecdote of the Duke of A--- and his
courtezan--Habits and promises--Penance.

Devotion in Roman Catholicism is totally distinct in its essence from
that of Protestantism. The devotion of Protestants is scriptural and
reasonable; that of Roman Catholics poetical and affectionate. The
Protestant considers God as a spiritual being, and, as such,
incomprehensible, the only object of worship, the only fountain of grace
and pardon. The Roman Catholic represents the Eternal in material forms,
accessible only through the indirect medium of intercession, and
addresses him with the familiarity and tenderness peculiar to the human
relations between a father and a son. In prayer the truly devout Roman
Catholic weeps, afflicts himself, gesticulates, touches the ground with
his forehead, kisses it, strikes his breast, and reveals, by his whole
physiognomy and exterior actions, a vehemence and intensity which his
physical frame appears scarcely able to sustain. His prayers are full of
poetical exclamations, which are called _jaculatorias_; and in addressing
the object of his devotion, he feels more complacency in accumulating
sonorous epithets, and in repeating groans and sighs, than in imploring,
by properly-constructed and continuous phrases, the protection and mercy
of the Almighty. Roman Catholic devotion gives a perfect idea of
ecstasy, and shows that religious enthusiasm, carried to the utmost
extreme, agitates the nervous system, and produces effects very similar
to those of mental abstraction; and, in truth, in those asylums provided
for the insane, we find many of their inmates to be persons who have
fallen into that deplorable state through religious enthusiasm. There
are other cases in which these excesses in devotion have ended in
catalepsy; and some of those women who have been celebrated for the
supernatural state in which it has been pretended they lived for many
years, without food, and insensible to all external impres