Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/131

Rh pray for them and with them, although not, like them, to the Madonna.

“We have a ladder of supplicators from earth up to the highest heaven!” I have heard Catholics say. “And we need no such ladder,” the Protestant Christian may reply, “because we stand, through Christ, in immediate relationship to God!” We shall to-day be present at the great annual festival of tongues of the Jesuits' Propaganda for La Fide Christiana.

January 14th.—This Collegio di Propaganda, founded by Gregory XV. for the purpose of educating Christian missionaries of all nations, who afterwards, each in his own tongue, shall proclaim the doctrine of Christ in his own native land, is a grand idea. But the festival of tongues, this year, did not give a high sense of the present stand-point of the institution. I naturally expected to hear the praise of Christ and his doctrine, expressed in many different languages. But the subject given out to all was La Colonna, which Pio Nino has had erected, in honor of the immaculate Virgin, on the Piazza di Spagna. All the pupils of the Propaganda were therefore to deliver an encomium on this column; and it was the glorification of La Colonna and the Virgin Mary, which again and again was repeated, in emphatic verse, and expressed in Hebrew, Armenian, Persian, Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Latin, and many other old languages, as well as many more modern ones—nay, I believe in every modern tongue except Swedish. A pale little boy represented the Danish.

The Hebrew, Persian, and Latin, sounded to my