Restless with her trouble, Hilda now entered upon another pilgrimage
among these altars and shrines. She climbed the hundred steps of the Ara
Coeli; she trod the broad, silent nave of St. John Lateran; she stood
in the Pantheon, under the round opening in the dome, through which
the blue sunny sky still gazes down, as it used to gaze when there were
Roman deities in the antique niches. She went into every church that
rose before her, but not now to wonder at its magnificence, when she
hardly noticed more than if it had been the pine-built interior of a New
England meeting-house.
She went--and it was a dangerous errand--to observe how closely and
comfortingly the popish faith applied itself to all human occasions. It
was impossible to doubt that multitudes of people found their spiritual
advantage in it, who would find none at all in our own formless mode of
worship; which, besides, so far as the sympathy of prayerful souls is
concerned, can be enjoyed only at stated and too unfrequent periods. But
here, whenever the hunger for divine nutriment came upon the soul, it
could on the instant be appeased. At one or another altar, the incense
was forever ascending; the mass always being performed, and carrying
upward with it the devotion of such as had not words for their own
prayer. And yet, if the worshipper had his individual petition to offer,
his own heart-secret to whisper below his breath, there were divine
auditors ever ready to receive it from his lips; and what encouraged him
still more, these auditors had not always been divine, but kept, within
their heavenly memories, the tender humility of a human experience. Now
a saint in heaven, but once a man on earth.
Hilda saw peasants, citizens, soldiers, nobles, women with bare heads,
ladies in their silks, entering the churches individually, kneeling for
moments or for hours, and directing their inaudible devotions to the
shrine of some saint of their own choice. In his hallowed person, they
felt themselves possessed of an own friend in heaven. They were too
humble to approach the Deity directly. Conscious of their unworthiness,
they asked the mediation of their sympathizing patron, who, on the score
of his ancient martyrdom, and after many ages of celestial life, might
venture to talk with the Divine Presence, almost as friend with friend.
Though dumb before its Judge, even despair could speak, and pour out the
misery of its soul like water, to an advocate so wise to comprehend the
case, and eloquent to plead it, and powerful to win pardon whatever
were the guilt. Hilda witnessed what she deemed to be an example of this
species of confidence between a young man and his saint. He stood before
a shrine, writhing, wringing his hands, contorting his whole frame in
an agony of remorseful recollection, but finally knelt down to weep and
pray. If this youth had been a Protestant, he would have kept all that
torture pent up in his heart, and let it burn there till it seared him
into indifference.