In the meantime I am greatly struck with the power exercised in the Roman Church by the great dogma of the Real Presence. It is the centre and life of the whole. It is the secret support of the priest's painful self-denying mission; by it mainly the religious orders maintain themselves; the warmest, deepest, lowliest, most triumphant and enraptured feelings surround it: the nun that adores in silence for hours together, one from the other taking up that solitary awful watch in the immediate presence of the King of Kings; the crowd of worshippers that kneel at the blessed yet fearful moment when earth and heaven are united by the coming down of the mystical Bridegroom into the tabernacle of His Church; the pious soul that not once or twice but many times during the day humbles itself before Him; the congregations which close the day by their direct homage to Him, as present to the three-fold nature of man, body, soul, and spirit; all these attest the deep practical import which the dogma of the Real Presence exerts on the Catholic mind. Are not their churches holier to the believing soul, than was the temple of Jerusalem when the visible glory of the Lord descended on it? For does not the single lamp burning before the shrine indicate a Presence inexpressibly more condescending, gracious, and exalting to man? In Catholic countries the offering of direct adoration, the contemplation of the mind absorbed in the abyss of the Incarnation, never ceases one instant of the day or night. It is the response of the redeemed heart for ever making to Him, "Who when He took upon Him to deliver man did not abhor the Virgin's womb." When I contrast this with--what is still too common in this country, though happily growing less so daily--the beggarly deal or oak table covered with worm-eaten cloth, or left bare in its misery--with the deserted or pew-encumbered chancel, from which every feeling of reverence seems for ages to have departed--or with the pert enclosure domineered over by reading-desk and pulpit, and commanded all round by galleries: and on which, perhaps once a month, the highest mystery of the faith is commemorated among us, I do not wonder at the Roman Catholic, who regards the English Church as a sheer apostacy, a recoil from all that is controlling, ennobling, and transcendental in faith to a blank gulf of unbelief.