Yet Another Time I Was Driving Through A Certain Piazza Where
The Peasants Stand Night Long Waiting To Be Hired
By the proprietors who
come to find them there, and suddenly the piety of the Middle Ages stood
before me
In the figure of the Brotherhood of the Misericordia, draped
to the foot and hooded in their gray, unbleached linen. The brothers
were ranged in a file at the doors of the church ready to visit the
house of sickness or of mourning, barefooted, with their eyes showing
spectrally through their masks and their hands coming soft and white out
of their sleeves and betraying the lily class that neither toils nor
spins and yet is bound, as in the past, to the poorest and humblest
through the only Church that knows how to unite them in the offering and
acceptance of reciprocal religious duties.
In Rome, as elsewhere in Catholic countries, it seemed to me that the
worshippers were mostly of the poorer classes and were mostly old women,
but in the Church of the Jesuits I saw worshippers almost as well
dressed as the average of our Christian Scientists, and in that church,
whose name I forget, but which is in the wide street or narrow piazza
below the windows of the palace where the last Stuarts lived and died,
my ineradicable love of gentility was flattered and my faith in the
final sanctification of good society restored by the sight of gentlemen
coming to and going from prayer with their silk hats in their hands.
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