It is surely in the essence of a pilgrimage that all vain imaginations are controlled by the greatness of our object.  Thus, if a man should go to see the place where (as they say) St. Peter met our Lord on the Appian Way at dawn, he will not care very much for the niggling of pedants about this or that building, or for the rhetoric of posers about this or that beautiful picture.  If a thing in his way seem to him frankly ugly he will easily treat it as a neutral, forget it and pass it by.  If, on the contrary, he find a beautiful thing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and love it.  This is what children do, and to get the heart of a child is the end surely of any act of religion.  In such a temper he will observe rather than read, and though on his way he cannot do other than remember the names of places, saying, “Why, these are the Alps of which I have read!  Here is Florence, of which I have heard so many rich women talk!” yet he will never let himself argue and decide or put himself, so to speak, before an audience in his own mind—­for that is pride which all of us moderns always fall into.  He will, on the contrary, go into everything with curiosity and pleasure, and be a brother to the streets and trees and to all the new world he finds.  The Alps that he sees with his eyes will be as much more than the names he reads about, the Florence of his desires as much more than the Florence of sickly-drawing-rooms; as beauty loved is more than beauty heard of, or as our own taste, smell, hearing, touch and sight are more than the vague relations of others.  Nor does religion exercise in our common life any function more temporarily valuable than this, that it makes us be sure at least of realities, and look very much askance at philosophies and imaginaries and academic whimsies.

Look, then, how a pilgrimage ought to be nothing but a nobler kind of travel, in which, according to our age and inclination, we tell our tales, or draw our pictures, or compose our songs.  It is a very great error, and one unknown before our most recent corruptions, that the religious spirit should be so superficial and so self-conscious as to dominate our method of action at special times and to be absent at others.  It is better occasionally to travel in one way or another to some beloved place (or to some place wonderful and desired for its associations), haunted by our mission, yet falling into every ordinary levity, than to go about a common voyage in a chastened and devout spirit.  I fear this is bad theology, and I propound it subject to authority.  But, surely, if a man should say, “I will go to Redditch to buy needles cheap,” and all the way take care to speak no evil of his neighbour, to keep very sober, to be punctual in his accounts, and to say his regular prayers with exactitude, though that would be a good work, yet if he is to be a pilgrim (and the Church has a hundred gates), I would rather for the moment that he went off in a gay, tramping spirit, not oversure of his expenses, not very careful of all he said or did, but illuminated and increasingly informed by the great object of his voyage, which is here not to buy or sell needles, or what not, but to loose the mind and purge it in the ultimate contemplation of something divine.