The beauty of the service, its music and its splendid symbolism, appealed for awhile to his artistic senses; but the questionings soon began again to unsettle the lad. For he found that he could not get to the root of things in this exquisite place even as far as with his old vicar. He had imagined the Roman Church as united--as agreed. He found it racked from one end to the other by the warring pronouncements of the Fathers. The cardinal himself it was who blew up the bridge that spanned the road to Rome. It was the day of a great mass at the Oratory. It had been noised abroad that the church was to be draped red with handsome draperies--that the cardinal was to speak, robed in his crimson vestments. All the leaders of society that held to the Papist tradition were to be there--and, as events turned out, there was, besides, a large gathering of Society that owned no allegiance to Rome, yet enjoyed a handsome pageant. The boy and girl went--anxious to hear what message the illustrious prince of the Church had for their hearts--what guidance for their lives--what he had to say upon the great intellectual advancement of the age--what upon the great questions that loomed before the puzzled brain of man. And he, the appointed spokesman of the infallible church, smooth-faced, aristocratic, magnificent, arose from his seat at his ordered place in the elaborate service, and his voice broke the musical refrain of the splendid ceremonial with disturbing accent but to reiterate the narrow message of his Church that only through absolute subjection of mind and body to the forms and traditions and quaint superstitions of that Church could man be saved from everlasting damnation; and, with triumphant note, he revelled in the fact, and could get to little else, that the English Church, which had persecuted Rome for generations, had now begun to place her images upon its altars and in the emptied niches of its portals--had indeed filched the rubric and the habits and the symbols of his Church! And, with exultant voice, swelling to arrogance, he, with the same lips that called his Church catholic, whilst in the very act of narrowing it to a parochial destiny, twitted with parochialism the land whose large religious toleration allowed his Church to live unmolested where that same Church had made a shamble and a stews when it was in power, debauching its once opportunity by fire and torture, showing in such strange hellish wise its large Catholicism to such as had differed from its narrow creed. He spoke passionately of past persecution--he omitted to say who had taught the lesson. But of the Why and the How and the Whence and the Whither--nothing. All the flattest Agnosticism....