and your religious liberty enforces obedience to its laws without any exception.  It is true that our Catholicism imposes very hard penance upon those who have embraced a monastic life.  This state, freely chosen, is a mysterious relation between man and the Deity; but the religion of laymen in Italy is an habitual source of affecting emotions.  Love, hope, and faith, are the principal virtues of this religion, and all these virtues announce and confer happiness.  Our priests therefore, far from forbidding at any time the pure sentiment of joy, tell us that it expresses our gratitude towards the Creator.  What they exact of us, is an observance of those practices which prove our respect for our worship, and our desire to please God, namely, charity for the unfortunate, and repentance for our errors.  But they do not refuse absolution, when we zealously entreat it; and the attachments of the heart inspire a more indulgent pity amongst us than anywhere else.  Has not Jesus Christ said of the Magdalen:  Much shall be pardoned her, because she hath loved much?  These words were uttered beneath a sky, beautiful as ours; this same sky implores for us the Divine mercy.”

“Corinne!” answered Lord Nelville, “how can I combat words so sweet, and of which my heart stands so much in need?  But I will do it, nevertheless, because it is not for a day that I love Corinne—­I expect with her a long futurity of happiness and virtue.  The most pure religion is that which makes a continual homage to the Supreme Being, by the sacrifice of our passions and the fulfilment of our duties.  A man’s morality is his worship of God; and it would be degrading the idea we form of the Creator, to suppose that He wills anything in relation with His creature, that is not worthy of His intellectual perfection.  Paternal authority, that noble image of a master sovereignly good, demands nothing of its children that does not tend to make them better or happier.  How then can we imagine that God would exact anything from man, which has not man himself for its object?  You see also what confusion in the understandings of your people results from the practice of attaching more importance to religious ceremonies than to moral duties.  It is after Holy Week, you know, that the greatest number of murders is committed at Rome.  The people think, to use the expression, that they have laid in a stock during Lent, and expend in assassination the treasures of their penitence.  Criminals have been seen, yet reeking with murder, who have scrupled to eat meat on a Friday; and gross minds, who have been persuaded that the greatest of crimes consists in disobeying the discipline of the church, exhaust their consciences on this head, and conceive that the Deity, like human sovereigns, esteems submission to his power more than every other virtue.  This is to substitute the sycophancy of a courtier for the respect which the Creator inspires, as the source and reward of a scrupulous and delicate life.  Catholicism in Italy, confining itself to external demonstrations, dispenses the soul from meditation and self-contemplation.  When the spectacle is over, the emotion ceases, the duty is fulfilled, and one is not, as with us, a long time absorbed in thoughts and sentiments, which give birth to a rigid examination of one’s conduct and heart.”