“If mental excitement, attended with the most thrilling and sublime sensations, the effect of deception, could be indulged without injury to our noblest faculties--if life could be made a long dream without the painful startings produced by the din and collision of the world--if the opium of delusion could be largely administered without a complete enervation of our rational energies--the lot of a man of feeling, brought up in the undisturbed belief of the Catholic doctrines, and raised to be a dispenser of its mysteries; would be enviable above all others. No abstract belief, if I am to trust my experience, can either soothe our fears or feed our hopes, independently of the imagination; and I am strongly inclined to assert, that no genuine persuasion exists upon unearthly subjects, without the co-operation of the imaginative faculty. Hence the powerful effects of the splendid and striking system of worship adopted by the Roman church. A foreigner may be inclined to laugh at the strange ceremonies performed in a Spanish cathedral, because these ceremonies are a conventional language to which he attaches no ideas. But he that from the cradle has been accustomed to kiss the hand of the priest, and receive his blessing--that has associated the name and attributes of the Deity with the consecrated bread--that has observed the awe with which it is handled--how none but annointed hands dare touch it--what clouds of incense, what brilliancy of gems surround it when exposed to the view--with what heartfelt anxiety the glare of lights, the sound of music, and the uninterrupted adoration of the priests in waiting, are made to evince the overpowering feeling of a God dwelling among men--such a man alone can conceive the state of a warm-hearted youth, who, for the first time approaches the altar, not as a mere attendant, but as the sole worker of the greatest of miracles.
“No language can do justice to my own feelings at the ceremony of ordination, the performance of the first mass, and during the interval which elapsed between this fever of enthusiasm and the cold scepticism that soon followed it. For some months previous to the awful ceremony I voluntarily secluded myself from the world, making religious reading and meditation the sole employment of my time. The _Exercises of Saint Ignatius_, which immediately preceded the day of ordination, filled my heart with what appeared to me a settled distaste for every wordly pleasure. When the consecrating rights had been performed--when my hands had been annointed--the sacred vesture, at first folded on my shoulders, let drop around me by the hands of the bishop--the sublime hymn to the all-creating Spirit uttered in solemn strains, and the power of restoring sinners to innocence, conferred upon me--when, at length, raised to the dignity of a ‘fellow-worker with God,’ the bishop addressed me, in the name of the Saviour: ‘Henceforth I call you not servant ... but I have called you friend;’ I truly felt as if, freed from the material part of my being, I belonged to a higher rank of existence. I had still a heart, it is true--a heart ready to burst at the sight of my parents, on their knees, while impressing the first kiss on my newly-consecrated hands; but it was dead to the charms of beauty. Among the friendly crowd that surrounded me for the same purpose, were those lips which a few months before I would have died to press; yet I could but just mark their superior softness. In vain did I exert myself to check exuberance of feelings at my first mass. My tears bedewed the _corporals_ on which, with the eyes of faith, I beheld the disguised lover of mankind whom I had drawn from heaven to my hands. These are dreams, indeed,--the illusions of an over-heated fancy; but dreams they are which some of the noblest minds have dreamt through life without waking--dreams which, while passing vividly before the mental eye, must entirely wrap up the soul of every one who is neither _more_ nor _less_ than a man.