“I shall offer some objections of the same kind to that splendid form of worship, which according to you, acts so powerfully upon the imagination.  I believe the imagination to be modest, and retired as the heart.  The emotions which are imposed on it, are less powerful than those born of itself.  I have seen in the Cevennes, a Protestant minister who preached towards the evening in the heart of the mountains.  He invoked the tombs of the French, banished and proscribed by their brethren, whose ashes had been assembled together in this spot.  He promised their friends that they should meet them again in a better world.  He said that a virtuous life secured us this happiness; he said:  do good to mankind, that God may heal in your heart the wound of grief.  He testified his astonishment at the inflexibility and hard-heartedness of man, the creature of a day, to his fellow man equally with himself the creature of a day, and seized upon that terrible idea of death, which the living have conceived, but which they will never be able to exhaust.  In short, he said nothing that was not affecting and true:  his words were perfectly in harmony with nature.  The torrent which was heard in the distance, the scintillating light of the stars, seemed to express the same thought under another form.  The magnificence of nature was there, that magnificence, which can feast the soul without offending misfortune; and all this imposing simplicity, touched the soul more deeply than dazzling ceremonies could have done.”

On the second day after this conversation, Easter Sunday, Corinne and Lord Nelville went together to the square of St Peter, at the moment when the Pope appears upon the most elevated balcony of the church, and asks of heaven that benediction which he is about to bestow on the land; when he pronounces these words, urbi et orbi (to the city and to the world)—­all the assembled people fell on their knees, and Corinne and Lord Nelville felt, by the emotion which they experienced at this moment, that all forms of worship resemble each other.  The religious sentiment intimately unites men among themselves, when self-love and fanaticism do not make it an object of jealousy and hatred.  To pray together in the same language, whatever be the form of worship, is the most pathetic bond of fraternity, of hope, and of sympathy, which men can contract upon earth.

FOOTNOTE: 

[31] Kant.

Chapter vi.

Easter-Day was passed, and Corinne took no notice of the fulfilment of her promise to confide her history to Lord Nelville.  Wounded by this silence, he said one day before her that he had heard much of the beauty of Naples, and that he had a mind to visit it.  Corinne, discovering in a moment what was passing in his soul, proposed to perform the journey with him.  She flattered herself that she, should be able to postpone the confession which he required of