"Thursday, June 1.--To-day is the feast of Corpus Domini, one of the greatest in the Catholic Church; so at eight we went, having breakfasted [a fact, by the bye, he seldom omits to mention], to St. Peter's, to see the _funzioni_, which are very grand on this occasion. There was a great procession round the _cortile_--first of the religious orders, about 450 monks only; and the boys of St. Michael's Hospital, of the Collegio Romano, &c. Then came curates, and priests temporal and secular, prelates, and monsignores, the ensigns or canopies of the seven basilicas with their chapters, and the priests belonging to them following; next came bishops, then cardinals, and then the Pope, carried on four men's shoulders. He was packed up on the top of the stand with his head out alone. He seemed more dead than alive, and worse than on May 11 at S. Giovanni's. The group of people about him, with their robes and splendid mitres, made a very brilliant sight. The former part of the procession rather showed the decadence of the Church from a great height, than its present glory. After the Pope came the _guardia nobile_, and other soldiers, in splendid uniforms. After the procession there were functions in the Church, and a benediction from the Altar, and which I did not see so well. St. Peter's never showed so well as with a crowd of people in it, when one may estimate its dimensions from the comparison of their littleness." This is a fair specimen of how a candid, prejudiced Protestant stares at Catholic services. He puts down as undisputed that all is absurd before he goes, and if the Man of Sin himself, the poor Pope, is in the middle of it, it rises to the very highest pitch of abomination. A man who could consider holiday attire and exultation impious on Easter Sunday, and the mourning and fasting and processions of Good Friday something worse, cannot be very well qualified to comprehend the Ascension and Corpus Christi in Rome. Catholics _do_ believe in the authority of the Pope and the power of the Keys, and also in the Real Presence; will it not follow, as a natural conclusion, that the four quarters of the globe should get its spiritual Father's blessing one day in the year, and that we should try to find out the best way of honouring our Incarnate God in the Blessed Sacrament? {80} But consistency is not a gift one finds among Protestants, especially when they give their opinion on what they think too absurd to try to understand. They must admit the Catholic ceremonial is imposing; but then it is only to quarrel with it for being so. They can understand pageantry and pomp in honouring an earthly monarch; but does it occur to them that every best gift is from above, and that the King of kings should be honoured with every circumstance of splendour and oblation a creature can offer?