This, unquestionably is destined in time to become THE GREAT CITY OF THE WEST. Its location is pleasant, and from the manner in which the upper part of the city is now building, I should think it would ultimately compete in regularity and beauty with almost any city in the Union. Its most prominent public buildings at present are the theatre and the Roman cathedral. One of the priests politely showed us through the latter building. The interior would be very grand and imposing, were it not for the gaudy paintings, intended as scriptural illustrations, suspended around the audience room. However much these may catch the attention and awaken the admiration of the _ignobile vulgus_, they cannot fail to excite any thing but complacency in minds accustomed to the more chaste productions of the pencil. In entering the church, we passed through the basement, where are the confessional boxes and a small altar, on which wax candles were burning. Here we saw one of the sisters of charity, sitting in black vestments, in a solitary dusky nook, as though absorbed in holy meditation. In the church we found another priest, engaged, as far as we could understand, in preparing a class of German boys for confirmation. I learned from an intelligent source that Romanism is making little or no progress among Protestants at St. Louis. They have found it necessary to cut off, or conceal many of its offensive excrescences, so that a friend remarked to me, that he thought that a reformation in spite of themselves, silent and gradual, was going on in the Roman Catholic Church. The fact is, that the great difficulty at St. Louis is, that the mass of the people "care for none of these things." They are equally indifferent to every form of religion. Of course iniquity abounds, and the institutions of God are trampled in the dust. The following fact will illustrate this point. As I went to church on Sunday morning, to my utter astonishment, in passing by the new theatre, I saw some twenty or thirty men at work on it--masons, house-carpenters, and painters. God's law, _Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy_, was to be of no account, because the people of St. Louis were anxious to have their new theatre opened on the evening of the Fourth of July! Each one of the usual denominations has a church here. From all I could learn, however, I fear religion is at a very low ebb in St. Louis. There are numberless discouragements to be encountered every where in the West, calculated to weaken the hands and depress the spirits of the ministers of religion. No one can understand the number or nature of these discouragements, without being actually on the ground. A successful missionary at the West must have great faith and patience, and be unwearied in his labours. To animate his clergy, and cheer them on in their toil, there could not be a better man than Bishop Kemper. He seems to throw sunshine around him wherever he goes.