If his reason for accepting the rectory was a strange one, his first step on taking possession was still stranger and still wiser. He determined to visit Rome and study the method pursued by the church in dealing with the souls committed to her care. "I want to go to Italy," said he, "not as a poet, or a tourist, or a pleased dreamer, but as a pilgrim who regards it as a second Palestine, the Holy Land of the West." Dr. Wiseman, then coadjutor bishop of the central district of England, gave him letters of introduction to Cardinal Acton and Dr. Grant at Rome, so that he was enabled to see much more of the charitable and religious institutions of the Christian capital than falls to the lot of the ordinary visitor. He studied Italian, in order that he might understand the numerous lives of saints in that language, and singularly enough, or providentially we should rather say, he conceived a particular devotion to St. Philip Neri, his future father. Of his visit to the room in which the saint used to say Mass he writes, "How little did I, a Protestant stranger in that room years ago, dream that I should ever be of the saint's family, or that the Oratorian father who showed it me should in a few years be appointed by the pope the novice-master of the English Oratorians. I remember how, when he kissed the glass of the case in which St. Philip's little bed is kept as a relic, he apologized to me as a Protestant, lest I should be scandalized, and told me with a smile how tenderly St. Philip's children loved their father. I was not scandalized with their relic-worship then, but I can understand better now what he said about the love, the child-like love, wherewith St. Philip inspired his sons. If any one had told me that in seven short years I should wear the same habit, and the same white collar in the streets of London, and be preaching a triduo in honor of Rome's apostle, I should have wondered how any one could dream so wild a dream." Sensibly as he was affected by the pious practices and associations of Rome, his attachment to the Church of England was as yet unshaken. He still cherished the delusion that some way could be found of connecting the Anglican establishment with this venerable apostolic church. Controversy on such points of doctrine as indulgences, etc., he put aside. "The one thing necessary to prove," said he, "is that adherence to the holy see is essential to the _being_ of a church: _to the_ well-_being of all churches I admit it essential_." He visited the church of the Lateran on St. John's day, and knelt bare-headed in the piazza to receive the holy father's blessing. "I do not think," he writes, "I ever returned from any service so thoroughly christianized in every joint and limb, or so right of heart, as I did from the Lateran on Thursday." Afterward Cardinal Acton obtained for him the favor of a private audience with Pope Gregory XVI., the story of which he tells in the following words: