Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/115

Rh side of Protestantism, and the but and the no, which from my earliest youth, rose up in my soul against certain doctrines of the reformers, become ever still more decided. It becomes ever more and more certain to me that they, in their honest zeal, more than once throw away the child with the water he was washed in, and that the Catholic church has kept more than one precious doctrine, which the Evangelical must yet adopt as her own, if she will fully desire the name of Evangelical. But the Protestant reform has dragged the human soul from under the mass of forms and human inventions, which, like an immense crystallization, a forest of parasites, had crept over it, threatening to suffocate its life; it has dragged the Holy Scriptures from the darkness, which—but I will not repeat what I have already said, and what you, my R——, probably know as well as I do, because—— But you are sleepy—good night!

New Year's Thoughts—Romantic Preludes—Festal Life in Rome—Beggars—“Museo Christiano”—Evening in the Palazzo Farnese—Festival of the Propaganda—Cold and Catarrh—View from the Capitol—Carnival—La Grippe—Preparations for Lent—Pontifical Jubilee, and Pontifical Bill of Fare—Soirée at the Grants'—Cardinal Antonelli. January, 1858.— to Italy, Sweden, to the whole world, and to you, my R——.