as he explained, the Gospel bid him turn the other cheek to the smiter, but it did not tell him what he was to do afterwards. [Illustration: THE STEPS OF ARA COELI The church which occupies the site of the Sabine arx. See pages 6, 86, 230-31.] The fierce light of publicity has transformed the lives of the Roman clergy and religious since 1870. Those Roman priests who live without reproach themselves, confess that "the revolution" has brought about this signal benefit. The _Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici_ which received impoverished nobles, ordained them, and sent them _at twenty-five years old_ to rule as prefects over the papal provinces was the fertile nursing-ground of a corrupt prelacy. The proud and affectionate interest with which the Romans, despite many lapses, regarded the popes, was not extended to the great papal officers who from the _Governatore di Roma_ downwards did not cease to provide a scandalous example to the people until the moment when "the Italians" entered the city. It will be said: these people at least were taught their religion? They were taught their religion as they were taught everything else--that is, not at all. They knew that you must obey the pope and obey the priest, that you would be damned if you did not go to confession and hear mass. But they thought one Madonna would hear their petitions better than another ("_Non andate da quella, non vale niente_" "don't go to that one, she is no good") and that exorcism was a surer remedy for a plague of bugs than cleanliness. They never heard a single verse of the Gospel explained to them, and young men of the higher _bourgeoisie_ learnt their religion if they learnt it at all, after 1870, when they were grown up and thought and read for themselves. Such men, many of whom belong to the _Circolo San Pietro_, are to-day the mainstay of intelligent and faithful religion in the city. Before 1870 there was in Rome a real ignorance of the doctrines, the beauties, and the duties, of Christianity. The one moment chosen for a great religious impression was of course the first Communion. Boys and girls were then enclosed and eight days were spent in pious exercises and instruction. The sons of the poor went to the _Cappellette di San Luigi_ at Ponte Rotto, the well to do to the same institution near Santa Maria Maggiore. On the other side of the basilica the girls of well to do families were prepared at the Bambin Gesu, the poor at San Pasquale. I am assured that at Ponte Rotto the effect of these eight days shut up in a religious house frequently changed the lives of boys with vicious tendencies. In other classes the appeal to unreal emotions was not always so successful, and the girls at the Bambin Gesu, dressed up in the stiff unaccustomed habit of the religious, often communicated with the one dread filling their minds that they might inadvertently commit "the sin" of touching the host with their teeth. Not less mistaken was the custom of the "Six