During his stay in Rome he made the acquaintance of our Father Dominic. This was a great happiness to him. Father Dominic was on fire for the conversion of England, and Father Spencer echoed back, with additions, every sentiment of his zealous soul. They spoke together, they wrote to each other, they got devout people to pray, and prayed themselves every day, for the conversion of England. We cannot know how far prayers go, we only know that the continual prayer of the just man availeth much; and therefore, it might not seem safe reasoning, to attribute effects that can be traced to other causes to the prayers of some devout servants of God. Without attempting to assign causes, we cannot help remarking the fact that these two holy souls began to pray, and enlist others in praying, for England's conversion in 1832, and that the first number of the "Tracts for the Times" appeared before the end of 1833. Neither of them had anything to do with the Tracts, if we except a few letters from Father Dominic in a Belgian newspaper, as writers or suggestors of matter; but both took a deep interest in them, and fed their hopes, as each appeared more Catholic than the one before. He spends a week with Father Dominic in Lucca, on his way to England, and in Geneva happened one of those interesting events with which his life was chequered. He thus tells it in a letter to the _Catholic Standard_ in 1853:-- "I went one day, at Genoa (see Chap. IX., Bk. i.), in 1820, to see the great relics in the treasury of the Cathedral. Relics, indeed, were little to me; but to get at these, three keys from various first-rate dignitaries, ecclesiastical and civil, were necessary. This was enough to make a young English sight-seer determined to get at them. A young priest, the sacristan of the Cathedral, received me and the party I had made up to accompany me, and showed us the precious treasures. I did nothing but despise; and yet why should I, or other Protestants, look on it as a kind of impossibility that any relic can be genuine? However, so I did; and I let the sacristan plainly know it. Yet he was not vexed. Nay, he treated {217} me with great affection, and said, among other things, 'The English are a worthy, good people, _brava nazione_; if only it had not been for that moment, that unhappy moment!' 'What moment do you mean?' said I. 'Ah! surely,' he replied, 'when Henry VIII. resolved on revolting against the Church.' I did not answer, but I thought within myself, 'Poor man, what ignorance! what infatuation! And what were my thoughts of that moment of which he spoke? My thoughts on this head had been formed in my young days, and, oh! how deep are first young thoughts allowed to take firm root undisturbed! When I was a child"----