The Performance Of Ritual Implies A Certain Measure Of Mechanism, And
The Wonder Is That In The Catholic Churches It Is Not More Mechanical
Than It Actually Is.
I was no great frequenter of functions, and I
cannot claim that my superior spirituality was ever deeply wounded;
sometimes it was even supported and consoled.
I noted, without offence,
in the Church of San Giuseppe how the young monk, who preached an
eloquent sermon on the saint's life and character, exhausted himself
before he exhausted his topic, and sat down between the successive heads
of his discourse and took a good rest. It was the saint's day, which
seemed more generally observed than any other saint's day in Rome, and
his baroque church in Via Capo le Case was thronged with people, mostly
poor and largely peasants, who were apparently not so fatigued by the
preacher's shrill, hard delivery as he was himself. There were many
children, whom their elders held up to see, and there was one young girl
in a hat as wide as a barrel-head standing up where others sat, and
blotting out the prospect of half the church with her flaring brim and
flaunting feathers. The worshippers came and went, and while the monk
preached and reposed a man crept dizzyingly round the cornice with a
taper at the end of a long pole lighting the chandeliers, while two
other men on the floor kindled the candles before the altars. As soon as
their work was completed, the monk, as if he had been preaching against
time, sat definitely down and left us to the rapture of the perfected
splendor. The high-altar was canopied and curtained in crimson, fringed
with gold, and against this the candle-flames floated like yellow
flowers. Suddenly, amid the hush and expectance, a tenor voice pealed
from the organ-loft, and a train of priests issued from the sacristy and
elbowed and shouldered their way through the crowd to the high-altar,
where their intoning, like so many
"Silver snarling trumpets 'gan to glide,"
and those flower-like flames and that tenor voice seemed to sing
together, and all sense of mortal agency in the effect was lost.
How much our pale Northern faith has suffered from the elimination of
the drama which is so large an element in the worship of the South could
not he conjectured without offence to both. Drama I have said, but, if I
had said opera, it would have been equally with the will merely to
recognize the fact and not to censure it. Many have imagined a concert
of praise in heaven, and portrayed it as a spectacle of which the elder
Christian worship seems emulous. Go, therefore, to Rome, dear
fellow-Protestant, with any measure of ignorance short of mine, but
leave as much of your prejudice behind you as you can. You are not more
likely to become a convert because of your tolerance; in fact, you may
be the safer for it; and it will prepare you for a gentler pleasure than
you would otherwise enjoy in the rites and ceremonies which seem exotic
in our wintrier world, but which are here native to the climate, or, at
least, could not have had their origin under any but oriental or
meridional skies.
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