“No language can do justice to my own feelings at the ceremony of ordination, the performance of the first mass, and during the interval which elapsed between this fever of enthusiasm and the cold scepticism that soon followed it. For some months previous to the awful ceremony I voluntarily secluded myself from the world, making religious reading and meditation the sole employment of my time. The _Exercises of Saint Ignatius_, which immediately preceded the day of ordination, filled my heart with what appeared to me a settled distaste for every wordly pleasure. When the consecrating rights had been performed--when my hands had been annointed--the sacred vesture, at first folded on my shoulders, let drop around me by the hands of the bishop--the sublime hymn to the all-creating Spirit uttered in solemn strains, and the power of restoring sinners to innocence, conferred upon me--when, at length, raised to the dignity of a ‘fellow-worker with God,’ the bishop addressed me, in the name of the Saviour: ‘Henceforth I call you not servant ... but I have called you friend;’ I truly felt as if, freed from the material part of my being, I belonged to a higher rank of existence. I had still a heart, it is true--a heart ready to burst at the sight of my parents, on their knees, while impressing the first kiss on my newly-consecrated hands; but it was dead to the charms of beauty. Among the friendly crowd that surrounded me for the same purpose, were those lips which a few months before I would have died to press; yet I could but just mark their superior softness. In vain did I exert myself to check exuberance of feelings at my first mass. My tears bedewed the _corporals_ on which, with the eyes of faith, I beheld the disguised lover of mankind whom I had drawn from heaven to my hands. These are dreams, indeed,--the illusions of an over-heated fancy; but dreams they are which some of the noblest minds have dreamt through life without waking--dreams which, while passing vividly before the mental eye, must entirely wrap up the soul of every one who is neither _more_ nor _less_ than a man.