"I fear you will think me a sad Protestant. I determined, and so did M----, to conform to the Catholic ritual here. We both of us got Mechlin breviaries at Mechlin, and go to church pretty regularly every day to say the hours, and we say the rest of the hours as the priests do, in carriages, or inns, or anywhere. Also, I have been tutorized in the breviary by a very _nice_ priest, a simple-hearted, pious fellow with little knowledge of theology. But it all will not do. The careless irreverence, the noise, the going in and out, the spitting of the priests on the altar-steps, the distressing representations of our Blessed Lord--I cannot get over them. The censing of the priests, the ringing of bells, the constant carrying of the blessed sacrament from one altar to another--this I can manage; because I can say psalms meanwhile. But at best, when I can get away into a side chapel with no wax virgins in it, and no hideous pictures of the FATHER, I cannot manage well." The idea that Anglicans were excommunicate from Western Christendom was a terrible distress to him. "Would you not like," he writes to the same friend, "to spend six months among the Munich disciples of Möhler, Döllinger, etc., etc.? Of course I shall know more of all this when I have travelled. I shall strive to realize all such little ways of impeded communion as are unstopped. It will surely do _me_ good, if no one else." He soon had the coveted opportunity for more extended travel; for in 1841, he went abroad as tutor to a young gentleman from Ambleside, and spent six months journeying through the countries bordering on the Mediterranean and the Danube, Styria, the Tyrol, and Northern Germany. Memorials of this interesting tour are found in some of his published poems and in a volume called _Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches and among Foreign Peoples_, which appeared in 1842, dedicated to Wordsworth. Into this book the author introduced many reflections upon religious matters, chiefly in the form of conversations with an imaginary representative of mediæval Christianity, as well as of Mr. Faber's own Catholic feelings, whom he calls "the Stranger." The volume closes with a dream, in which the author conducts the stranger through English cathedrals, with their bare altars and empty niches. "The stranger regarded them with indignation, but did not speak. When we came out of the church, he turned to me, and said in a solemn voice, somewhat tremulous from deep emotion, 'You have led me through a land of closed churches and hushed bells, of unlighted altars and unstoled priests. Is England beneath an interdict?'"