"Oh, do not talk so, Severinus, dear, pious father! Do not Look at me so sadly; do not be so stern and bitter, but enjoy with me the blessing of this peaceful morning. Let holy nature be the church in which our souls can unite in adoration of our common God. See, my friend, clearness of vision is as unavoidable a necessity to me as light and air; in clearness of vision God shows himself to me, while you only perceive him in mysteries. In order to see him I open my spiritual eyes; you close yours. I receive his manifestations with sharpened, you with artificially deadened, senses. I see him in each of these light clouds floating over the sunny sky; you darken your churches, and shroud yourselves in clouds of incense, that in the mysterious, rich-hued twilight you may paint a vague, fanciful picture. His natural and moral laws everywhere announce themselves to me in shining characters, and I serve him by cheerful obedience to them; you collect from the ambiguous writings of the Bible a book of church regulations, to which you slavishly submit, and exhaust your hearts and minds the superhuman effort of satisfying all your self-created duties." "I hope this is not the only result of your observation of our sublime worship. It must be the short residence on this dull German soil which has loosened the strings that resounded so clearly in Rome." "Do not cherish such a fancy, Severinus," said Cornelia, as she walked up and down the shore with him. "The forms of your worship, as I saw them in Rome, delighted me; nay, their grandeur and poesy aroused a wild enthusiasm. But it was the revelation of art, not that of the Deity, at which I gazed. All your miracles, all your lofty precepts, proved nothing except the grandeur of the human intellect, and in this the existence and influence of a God, which I never doubted, and which had been just as clearly revealed to me in every creation of genius. My God, to whom I pray in childish adoration, has remained the same; he has come from Rome with me the same as he went. You neither strengthened nor shook my belief; I cherish the deepest reverence for your worship of God; it is more beautiful, more sublime, than ours; my heart has opened to much that revealed a character of sincere piety, but I still see in it only a transitory _form_, liable to alter with the changes of centuries; while I bear within me the imperishable essence, ever the same through the lapse of ages."